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In a recent review of Dinner Rush, film critic Owen Gleiberman notes, "In the culinary-- obsession movies that inevitably get praised by critics as `mouthwatering" there is generally one lollapalooza cooking scene in which we're meant to ooh and aah over the dish being prepared as if we were the garlic-liberation minions packing the audience of Emeril Live."1 Gleiberman perhaps says more than he knows here; not only have "food films"become codified enough that we now look for innovation within the subgenre, but the conditions of reception for such films increasingly figure within an associative web of ethnic food fictions that draws from television, advertising, and a variety of new promotional ventures.
This essay investigates the way in which the preparation and consumption of food are centralized in many recent media projections of ethnic identity. From Babette's Feast (1987) and Moonstruck (1987) to Like Water for Chocolate (1993), Household Saints (1994), Eat Drink Man Woman (1995), Big Night (1996), and Polish Wedding (1998), ethnic film narratives seem more and more likely to involve the use of food as a key textual element.While independent and art films marketed in the United States as "ethnic" have adopted such gastronomic concerns, discourses of food and family are also prevalent in a number of recent advertising campaigns, notably, the series of ads run by Olive Garden, a national chain of Italian restaurants that presents its franchises as neighborhood restaurants in which exuberant Italian American families pass babies around while eating their meal.2
In the films and broadcast material referenced above, food becomes a vehicle for representing and cementing familial and quasi-familial bonds, playing out a nostalgic, recuperative response to the way that "the household, in effect, is undergoing structural, discursive, systematic and semiotic recombination in late capitalism."3 In these fictions, expertise with food is strongly linked to a sense of self-possession grounded in ethnic and/or national affiliation. Scenes of cooking and dining are carefully staged, and lighting and camerawork on the meals prepared are meticulous. The fetishistic depictions of food and food preparation work to recover the ethnic family, which is endowed with an emotional expressivity lost in late-twentieth-century white U.S. culture.4
I argue that such presentations of food and ethnic intimacy endeavor to correct for perceptions of...