Under the whole “cultural influence” thing, I think you could also include My Big Fat Greek Wedding. My ex-husband is Greek, and food plays a major cultural role for Greeks, which is shown very well in the movie.
Wow, I agree, the class sounds awesome. My secret dream is to someday attend a culinary program, even if I don’t ever make a career out of it, I think I’d just have fun (in a warped perverse way.)
Having gone to a culinary school that was pretty much what you’re describing (do they get Le Cordon Bleu certification, too?), I know exactly what you’re talking about in your range of students. Most of them hated taking any class in which you were not cooking in. I give you my sympathy, because it has to be hard to teach those who don’t care.
Pretty much everyone hit all the movies I would have mentioned, especially Tortilla Soup. That movie, for me, hits close to home since I worked for Milliken & Feniger (the Too Hot Tamales, who handled all the cooking for the film), when the movie came out.
As for reading, M.F.K. Fisher is a pretty good choice for memoirs. Personally, I’d throw in some Brilliat-Savarin, but that might be too much for them (but an excellent choice if you want to offer them a chance for extra credit). Still, some of his ideas about food and science are interesting from an eighteenth century perspective.
Having gone to a culinary school that was pretty much what you’re describing (do they get Le Cordon Bleu certification, too?), I know exactly what you’re talking about in your range of students. Most of them hated taking any class in which you were not cooking in. I give you my sympathy, because it has to be hard to teach those who don’t care.
Pretty much everyone hit all the movies I would have mentioned, especially Tortilla Soup. That movie, for me, hits close to home since I worked for Milliken & Feniger (the Too Hot Tamales, who handled all the cooking for the film), when the movie came out.
As for reading, M.F.K. Fisher is a pretty good choice for memoirs. Personally, I’d throw in some Brilliat-Savarin, but that might be too much for them (but an excellent choice if you want to offer them a chance for extra credit). Still, some of his ideas about food and science are interesting from an eighteenth century perspective.
Whoops. Dunno how I managed that double post.
Yes to the LCB. And actually, it’s not as bad for me; I’m going to be teaching evening classes, and I think I’ll be getting a lot of older students who are a bit more teachable, and if nothing else are likely to be mature enough to be professional about the whole thing; on the whole I don’t think the students will be too much different from Community College (I’ve only been here a month ago). But I think the morning guy gets a lot of the “why are we here” stuff.
Don’t miss the bizarre scene in “Le Fantôme de la Liberté” where people gather in public to share excretory functions, but must excuse themselves and go to a little room in order to eat.
More info here:
How can we have overlooked God of Cookery? I think you can get it in both subtitled and dubbed versions.
Rummaging around on the IMDB, I also found The Cook, an old Buster Keaton film.
It’s rather tempting to branch out into television. There’s an episode of *Buffy the Vampire Slayer * where she tries to make a perfect Thanksgiving meal…I think an effort to take back her normal (pre-slayer) life. [Season 4, Pangs]
There’s another episode of (forgive me while I show my age) *Three’s Company * where Chrissy asks Jack to cook a meal for her new boyfriend and she pretends she did the cooking. It’s an interesting look at the assumptions of women cook/men eat of the early 1970s, as well as Jack’s instant buckling under greater culinary authority. Of course, Jack was a cook so a number of the shows center around food.
A couple more:
**Dim Sum ** (Wayne Wang, 1984). After I watched it everyone in the cinema headed for the nearest Chinese restaurant.
The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) came before ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ and also had viewers’ tastebuds a-tingling.
All the others I would have suggested have already been mentioned.
That cookbook looks amazing. It’s going on my wishlist, I just hope they have some in stock when I have some money to order.
I’ll second this suggestion. The movie is from the director of Bend It Like Beckham and shows the Thanksgiving celebration of four households in Los Angeles; Vietnamese, Latino, Jewish and African-American. So I think it fits very well your interest in showing the impact of culture and family and food.
UPDATE:
Just thought I’d post this since some people said they were interested in the course. Tomorrow we’ll complete our first 3 week class, and all-in-all, we’re pleased with it. We’re also hoping, eventually, to make a custom textbook to go with the class.
The class is 2 1/2 hours a day for 3 weeks. At present, it’s organized as follows:
Week 1: Food as Art
**Big Night ** (wonderful unknown movie)
Dinner Rush
Week 2: Food in Families and Cultures
What’s Cooking
Eat Drink Man Woman
**Tortilla Soup ** (which is the same story as EDMW, but set in a different culture)
Week 3: Food as Transformation
**Mostly Martha
Babbette’s Feast **
Of course, there are a million ways to organize these: Some of the themes that came up in class were Food as Power or Control (from the Sudan to the more subtle depictions in these films), Food as Happiness, and Food as Sex. Every one of the films has those things in it. One of the final exam options will be to propose an alternative organization of the films.
There are also a number of readings that go with them; short stories, memoirs, essays, etc.
Our Second String (films that we will rotate in as some of the others get stale):
**Chocolat
Alive
Tampopo ** (if we can find a way to edit out the naughty bits)
Like Water for Chocolate (ditto, but not as easily edited)
**The Cookout **
We’re also thinking about making an assignment where they pick from a list of films not on our syllabus and analyze the role of food in it; things like **Under the Tuscan Sun ** or some of the others above would be perfect for that.
And of course, we’re always open to new ideas, so if you’re new to the thread, feel free to add any suggestions!
Finally: if anyone wants a copy of the “discussion guides” to the films (they aren’t much yet) and/or our readings, send me an email. Helpful suggestions and useful feedback might be rewarded in a textbook acknowlegement!
Somehow missed this the first go-round – sounds like a wonderful class!
And if you decide to go in a different direction next time, may I recommend La Grande Bouffe?
I know this isn’t exactly what you want, but there are classic scenes about food in The Godfather and Goodfellas that always make me hungry. Even mafiosi have to eat, and they take their food very seriously. Maybe you could just show the relevant clips from those films, as I think they are quite good.
This may be too late for your course, and it’s kind of hard to find anyway, but I’d recommend Les Blank’s documentary Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers. (Or, failing that, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
Pieces of April is a modest film about a young woman’s struggles to produce a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for her family, who is coming from New Jersey to visit her and her African-American boyfriend at her tiny apartment in a gritty neighborhood in lower Manhattan. The major hitch for April is that she discovers on T-Day that her oven doesn’t work – forcing her to ask her neighbors to give her some time using their ovens (the turkey actually gets shuttled around from oven to oven). Some of her neighbors are recently-arrived immigrants, who are unfamiliar with Thanksgiving traditions; others are unpleasant, manipulative, or socially alienated individuals (typically unfriendly New Yorkers). The film concludes with a huge feast thrown in April’s apartment, with the friendly, helpful neighbors sitting alongside April’s family, and everybody having a great time.
It’s not a classic or a masterpiece of filmmaking, but a reasonably well-crafted, modestly budgeted indie with a certain charm going for it.
Just for laughs – What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Woody Allen’s early B&W comedy about competing spies in their ruthless pursuit of a great egg salad recipie. The movie consists of repurposed B-grade Japanese spy flick, with Allen’s rapid-fire gaglines dubbed into the material. With Asian character names like “Suki Yaki” and “Teri Yaki,” you know the jokes are coming fast and cheap…
It’s a good selection of movies, except for Alive. Isn’t that the one about the Uruguayan rugby team that resorted to cannibalism when stranded in the Andes after a plane crash? It sounds like it’s more about desperation rather than food, but then again, I’ve deliberately avoided seeing it.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes? 
Every three weeks until they fire me. I’ll look at it.
Dewey Finn, the very same. And it is about food, albeit of an odd sort. It’s all about how the things we do to survive – which is why we eat, after all – also end up being much more than that. It’s not a horror flick. You’re missing a powerful, moving movie.
And I’ll definitely look at **Pieces of April ** – I saw the preview in the theaters, but forgot all about it – it would defintely be good to put in with (or rotate out) What’s Cooking.
[QUOTE=The Devil’s Grandmother]
How can we have overlooked God of Cookery? I think you can get it in both subtitled and dubbed versions.
If you like God of Cookery, you’ll probably also like The Chinese Feast, another screwball Hong Kong comedy (although not by Stephen Chow) about Chinese food.
As far as memoirs: M.F.K. Fisher is classic, although sometimes she tends towards the arrogant and overprivileged–her writing tends to be peppered with reminiscences about the wonderful vichyssoise she tried in the grand hotel in Switzerland, or the lovely truite au bleu in that charming little restaurant in Provence, etc.
Everyone seems to love Ruth Reichl’s memoirs, Comfort Me with Apples, Tender at the Bone, and Garlic and Sapphires, IIRC–she’s pretty good, but not great. Entertaining.
Nigel Slater wrote a wonderful food memoir called Toast. He doesn’t go so much for the nostalgic, glowy, Proustian style of most food writers–or even so much the route of deep sensual, erotic pleasure that you find in Like Water for Chocolate–the book is extremely honest, emotional, sometimes almost difficult to read because he talks so honestly about the shame and secrets in his life, and writes so candidly about the nasty British food he grew up eating.
John Thorne is my favorite food writer out there. You can find his website at
http://www.outlawcook.com
but they’ve redesigned it and now I can’t figure out how to navigate to any actual writing 
He wrote a very beautiful and sad short piece called “Last Gleaning,” about apples and his father’s slow decline and death.