“Want one?” says Lindsay Lohan’s Hallie Parker to her yet-unknown twin sister, Annie James, as she pulls a packet of Oreos from her backpack in the 1998 film The Parent Trap. The two have just been sent to their summer camp’s isolation cabin as punishment for misbehaving, and they’re on the cusp of discovering they’re twin sisters, separated at birth (yes, somehow the identical faces didn’t give it away immediately). “Oh, sure, I love Oreos,” says (also) Lindsay Lohan’s Annie in response. “At home... I eat them with peanut butter,” she finishes apprehensively. Unsurprisingly, given the aforementioned genetic connection, Hallie turns around, shocked, and answers, “You do? That is so weird, so do I,” before pulling a tub of the stuff from her bag. The two settle in to eat their snacks, while discussing their lives.
I must have been about six years old the first time I watched The Parent Trap. Not even 15 minutes after that scene, my obliging mother was driving me to the supermarket in search of Oreos and peanut butter, two things I’d never been enthusiastic about before. Something about the combination of the flavours, and the visuals of these girls breaking bread (or biscuits) over Oreos dipped in peanut butter stuck with me. My cravings were well and truly powerfully activated.
This is hardly the first – or the most impressive – case of food being brought to life in film, either. In fact, over the years, many films have even dedicated themselves solely to the visceral reaction food elicits from viewers. Take, for example, the 1987 film Babette’s Feast. The story follows Frenchwoman Babette as she moves in with devoutly religious sisters Martine and Filippa in Denmark. Babette slowly improves their bland cooking until the film’s climax – a decadent French feast Babette cooks for the sisters and their congregation, where eating the food becomes a religious experience of its own. Or, the 1996 film Big Night, which crescendoes in the preparation of a gargantuan timpano – a dome-like, baked Italian pasta dish which, in the case of Big Night, is packed full of meat, eggs, sausage, sauce and more. Meanwhile, in 1992’s Like Water for Chocolate, elaborate cooking and eating scenes are imbued with a sense of magical realism, where the main character and cook Tita’s emotions are replicated in the food with dramatic results.
Then there are the films where, much like in the case of Babette’s Feast, food is used as a metaphor for sexuality. In 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, the iconic ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene takes place over enormous sandwiches at Katz’s Deli. 2000’s Chocolat sees numerous scenes of chocolate being consumed seductively, while Heartburn’s postcoital spaghetti carbonara remains one of the most iconic on-screen dishes ever made.
Chef Slowik, played by Ralph Fiennes, in the kitchen at the fictional Hawthorne restaurant in the 2022 film The Menu
In his book Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, Professor Charles Spence writes, “Given our brains have evolved to find food, it should perhaps come as little surprise to discover that some of the largest increases in cerebral blood flow occur when a hungry brain is exposed to images of desirable food.” Our neurological sensors fire into overdrive when we see food on screen. And, as Spence tells me, “food in motion is even more attractive”. That means that when we’re watching a film or television show, and someone picks up a sandwich and moves it towards their mouth or, in the context of my cravings from The Parent Trap, dips an Oreo into peanut butter, we’re even more inclined to develop a desire for that particular food.
“The human brain rapidly determines the energy density of foods that happen to be visible in a scene, and thereafter directs its attentional resources accordingly,” writes Spence in a 2022 academic paper Factors influencing the visual deliciousness / eye-appeal of food. He continues to say, “The taste qualities associated with images of food are rapidly computed, and flavour expectations are generated, in part via embodied mental simulations.” Because we’re so hardwired to seek out food, our brains process food as a visual medium more thoroughly than many other images, which also means we’re more inclined to remember these edible elements over others – so, in my case, the Oreos in peanut butter or mention of chocolate chip pancakes in The Parent Trap remains a core memory long after I’ve forgotten the matching yellow twinset Lindsay Lohan wore, or the intricate, choreographed handshake she performed with her butler.
I am, perhaps, a skewed test subject on the topic, given I’ve spent most of my life consumed by thoughts of food – planning meals, ruminating on what I might be having for dinner, or simply taking inventory of niche and potent cravings. I was curious about whether other people also had powerful memories of foods they’d seen on film. Taking to the very scientific medium of my Instagram stories, I sent out an answer box with a simple question: “Is there a food from a movie that always stuck with you that you’ve really wanted to eat?”
We are hungry beings and seeing food on screen is immensely evocative
The responses were numerous, enthusiastic and, notably, repetitive. A number of people referenced the scene in Spirited Away, a 2001 Japanese animated film, where the parents feast on food before being turned into pigs. A few touched on the chocolate and candy-covered pasta Buddy makes for himself in Elf. Interestingly, multiple people referenced the grey, fake food in Hook, while the Turkish delight from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the chocolate cake from Matilda were also popular mentions.
While there were a few modern-day film references – the grilled cheese in Chef and the ram-don in Parasite, to name a few – by and large, it is mostly nostalgic childhood films that are sparking these strong culinary memories. In his 2017 paper Comfort food: a review, Spence highlights the impact nostalgia has on the comfort food cravings we develop, writing “Comfort foods are often prepared in a simple or traditional style and may have a nostalgic or sentimental appeal. Comfort foods tend to be the favourite foods from one’s childhood, or else linked to a specific person, place or time with which the food has a positive association.” Films, particularly those we watched as children, are often accompanied by positive memories: connection, memorable narrative, and entertainment. It makes sense, then, that these nostalgia-hued food memories from films would become so deeply embedded in our brains.
It’s this idea of nostalgia that drove Amy Fernando to set up Taste Film, an events company in London and Manchester, that hosts film screenings and designs specific menus around food featured in the films. Previous screenings have included Bridesmaids, Ratatouille, and Pretty Woman. “We’re drawn to films that have emotional depth – cult favourites, comfort watches, or anything with scenes people still talk about years later,” Fernando remarks when I ask how they choose the films on their schedule. “The food doesn’t have to be front and centre, but it has to feel important – like it’s part of the storytelling.”
Dishes from The Princess and the Frog menu at Taste Film
Dishes from Chef menu at Taste Film
Unsurprisingly, it was a specific film-based food memory that sparked the initial concept of Taste Film. “The idea struck during Goodfellas – that scene where the garlic’s sliced so thin it melts in the pan. I thought, What if we could break the fourth wall? What if we could actually taste that moment and step into the scene?” Fernando tells me. Interestingly, though, the menus at a Taste Film event aren’t always direct replications of dishes you see on screen. Yes, for food-focused movies like Chef and Ratatouille the team tries their best to bring the cheese toastie and nominal ratatouille to life, but for others “it’s more about capturing the feeling or meaning behind the food, rather than copying it exactly,” Fernando says.
When it comes to why these specific dishes stick in our brain, Fernando observes, “It’s rarely about how fancy or complicated the food is. It’s about what it represents in that moment. Sometimes it’s tied to childhood, or comfort, or identity. Maybe it reminds us of someone, or taps into a really specific feeling. When a dish lands at the right point in the story, we hold onto it without even realising.” She adds that food on screen is often a multisensory experience, capturing feeling through vision and sound – be it the close-ups of the chocolate cake in Matilda and the weight it gives to that scene, or the languid cheese pulls and satisfying, bone-tingling crunch of the cheese toastie in Chef.
This ties into Spence’s ideas that we are “visually dominant creatures,” and that “input from our eyes dominates over that from other senses.” We are, at our core, hungry beings, and seeing food – or even simply the idea of food – on screen is immensely evocative, sending numerous internal sensors pinging. There’s no good reason I should have held onto the Oreos dipped in peanut butter for so long – when I did finally get my hands on the packet of Oreos and tub of peanut butter, the snack itself wasn’t particularly impressive. But the combination of factors: a popular snack food, the unique nature of the flavour profile, and the fact that The Parent Trap remains one of my favourite nostalgic films, means my brain has retained the memory of the food, despite the reality of the two together being nothing special.
Food is woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s one of our core needs for survival
Food is woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s one of our core needs for survival, so it’s only natural that it has made its way onto the screen in many different forms, too. Often surpassing simple nourishment, we attach many emotions to food: joy, sensuality, anger and in some cases, as was perfectly exhibited in the 2022 film The Menu, horror. There are few plot devices more universally relatable, and few images so beguiling to our brains, and so food remains an effective and memorable facet of a film, becoming, in many ways, a main character all of its own, taking up space in our brains and impacting the plot.
Whether it’s a cheeseburger dripping down a character’s fingers as a deliciously grotesque symbol of the joy of the pure simplicity of food in The Menu, the fake food in Hook as a representation of the playful, childlike delight of the lost boys, or the foie gras-stuffed, pastry-wrapped quail in Babette’s Feast reminding viewers of the sinful pleasure of eating with reckless abandon, we are hardwired to viscerally react to food on screen, embedding it in our brains and holding onto it through every hungry stage of our lives. And, scene.
