The greatest meal I ever made was Thanksgiving, 2009. To be honest, my cooking wasn’t brilliant and I didn’t really know what I was doing. But there was something else about that meal that made it the greatest—the people around the table made that meal a warm light during a dark time. In 2008, our family had split apart and I became homeless. My wife moved back to Germany with our two youngest children, my oldest daughter was working in Ecuador, another daughter was working in Washington, D.C., and my older son was off at college in Minnesota.
That left just four of us out of our family of ten: me and three of my kids still in the state. We arrived at my daughter Claire’s apartment in the Mission District in San Francisco and started making a list of what we needed to buy to make Thanksgiving dinner the next day.
I had never cooked a major meal before and my entire experience in the kitchen pretty much topped out at making myself a sandwich. But it was Thanksgiving. I wanted to make a traditional meal. Sure, I was homeless and my kids were lonely for the rest of our family, but we were going to celebrate, because, well, what exactly were we thankful for, again? Uhh… I was healthy and so were they, and every member of our family, wherever we were scattered, were healthy as well. Let’s give thanks for that. Next year, I said to myself, maybe the list of things we’re thankful for will be longer.
I googled how to make each dish and how to roast a turkey and then worked all the next morning. We served dinner late that afternoon on the tiny table in Claire’s tiny apartment. Was the food any good? I don’t remember. What I do remember was how happy I was. I had made a meal for some of my children and we had laughed and talked and gossiped all day and into the night. Homelessness and separation and despair and loneliness—those were for another day. It was Thanksgiving and we were—at least some of us—together.
Today we are going to look at movies that celebrate food and eating. These aren’t holiday movies (there are plenty of those). These are the kind of movies that remind us of the joy and sometimes miraculous nature of making and eating a meal. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.
This is an utterly delightful movie. If you haven’t seen it, you really need to put it at the top of your queue. Tampopo is a young widow running a noodle restaurant in an industrial part of town, raising a young son on her own, and struggling to eke out a living. Two truck drivers stop by one night and, through a convoluted sequence of events, decide to help her turn her mediocre ramen diner into a great restaurant. And that’s just part of the movie. There are several other tangentially connected storylines involving a gangster in a white suit, a group of homeless people who are outstanding singers, a dying wife making her final dinner for the family, and an elderly con man conning another con man. This movie is by turns uproarious, melancholy, sexy, and uplifting. It’s also a movie that will light up your life with the joy of cooking a great meal. Written and directed by the marvelous Japanese actor/writer/director Juzo Itami.
This movie is reportedly a favorite of Pope Francis. Set in the 19th century, two Danish spinsters (is that word even allowed anymore?) take in Babette, a broken-hearted refugee fleeing civil unrest and a tragic love affair in France to work in a bleak religious community on the Danish coast. One day, Babette learns that she has won $10,000 in the French lottery and offers to make “a real French dinner” for this dwindling community of Danish ascetics. She ends up spending all of her winnings on this one meal. This is an incredibly moving and deeply religious film (without any preaching). The sumptuousness of Babette’s feast is the centerpiece of this movie. Be sure to have Kleenex available, because you will be crying by the end.
There are three universally beloved figures in Los Angeles: Sandy Koufax, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and the late Jonathan Gold. The first two are obvious. The third? He was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and the first such critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for writing about food. But Jonathan Gold was far more than that—he wrote about the hundreds of innovative LA family restaurants serving food from around the world in a way that made a huge and sprawling city seem intimate and familiar. Why would someone who has never lived in Los Angeles want to watch a documentary about a restaurant critic? Because this movie is about more than Gold’s career. It’s about how his reviews transformed struggling ethnic family restaurants into successes and how he opened up a complicated city to people who would have never known these places existed. Regardless of where you live, the next time to go into a small ethnic restaurant in a strip mall or down a troubled street only to discover some amazing cooking, you will think of Jonathan Gold. Food, he believed, is what can bring us together.
This story goes between the lives of the great chef Julia Child and Julie Powell, a contemporary New Yorker who decides to cook every recipe within Child’s famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. An inspiring and delightful movie. Meryl Streep is wonderful as Julia Child in the phase of her life when she was actually “mastering the art of French cooking.” Amy Adams is Julie Powell, a mousey New Yorker in a soul-killing cubicle job who decides to come home every day and sacrifice herself over to the recipes and then blog about her experience. The movie tells the story of both women’s struggles in the kitchen and at home. This was the final film from screenwriter and director Nora Ephron, and is a testament to her contributions to American film.
It’s just about impossible to pick the best Pixar movie (this one is up there), but there is no question as to which one is the wittiest and most clever. Ratatouille tells the story of a Parisian rat who loves to cook and helps make a young cook in a struggling restaurant stand out. Ratatouille is also a famous French vegetable stew. And the cleverness just whirs on from there. The animation is brilliant, the story is fast-paced and exciting, and there are villains and heroes and fun all around. The comedian Patton Oswalt voices the title character, and his work is earnest, passionate, and big-hearted. It’s one of the finest voice performances in any of Pixar’s films. So find a recipe for ratatouille and watch this movie while it simmers on the stove. Dinner will taste even better.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.