FOODS IN MOVIES

Something shifted in the 2020s. Food on screen stopped being a backdrop and became the entire story — not as fantasy or nostalgia, but as an unflinching examination of the industry itself. The romance was replaced by the reality: the burns, the screaming, the sixteen-hour shifts, the addiction, the artistry that costs everything.

This decade gave us The Bear, which made kitchen anxiety into prestige television. The Menu, which turned fine dining into horror. Boiling Point, which filmed an entire restaurant service in one take. Pig, which used a truffle pig as a meditation on grief and authenticity. These aren't food movies in the way Julie & Julia was a food movie. They're films about the human cost of feeding other people.

Welcome to the new era of food cinema, where the kitchen is a warzone, the chef is an antihero, and the question isn't "does it taste good?" but "what does it cost?"

The Bear (2022–) — "Yes, Chef"

Christopher Storer's The Bear hit FX like a grease fire and never let up. Jeremy Allen White plays Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto, a fine-dining prodigy who inherits his brother's chaotic Chicago beef sandwich shop after a suicide. The show is shot and edited like a thriller — rapid cuts, handheld cameras, overlapping dialogue — and the kitchen scenes are so authentically stressful that actual chefs have reported anxiety attacks watching it.

But The Bear isn't just chaos. It's also about the transcendent moments — when a dish comes together perfectly, when the brigade clicks, when Carmy achieves the quiet focus that made him great before grief shattered him. The show respects food enough to show both sides: the beauty and the brutal cost of pursuing it.

Season 2's "Fishes" episode — a feature-length flashback to a disastrous family Christmas dinner — is one of the greatest food-related episodes in television history. The food is magnificent, the family dynamics are volcanic, and the entire thing unfolds in real time with the relentless energy of a pressure cooker about to blow.

The Menu (2022) — Fine Dining as Horror

Mark Mylod's The Menu takes every pretension of haute cuisine and turns it into a knife. Ralph Fiennes plays Chef Slowik, a culinary genius who has lost all connection to the joy of cooking and decided to make his final meal a statement — served to wealthy guests who represent everything wrong with food culture.

The courses are exquisite and menacing. "The Island" features a breadless bread plate (with accompaniments but no bread, because bread is for the common people). "The Mess" splashes sauce across the plate like a Jackson Pollock. Each dish is a critique disguised as cuisine, and the wealthy diners are too intimidated to admit they don't understand what they're eating.

The film's genius is in Anya Taylor-Joy's Margot, who cuts through the pretension by asking for a cheeseburger. Slowik, who has forgotten what it means to simply make someone happy with food, is genuinely moved. It's the most damning commentary on food culture since... well, since Ratatouille's "not everyone can cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere."

Boiling Point (2021) — One Take, One Service

Philip Barantini's Boiling Point is a technical marvel: the entire film unfolds in a single, unbroken take over the course of one catastrophic dinner service at a London restaurant. Stephen Graham plays Andy Jones, a head chef drowning in debt, addiction, and the impossible demands of running a kitchen.

The one-take format is more than a gimmick. It forces you into the rhythm of a real kitchen — the escalating tension, the cascading failures, the moments where everything hangs by a thread. When an allergen mishap threatens a diner's life, when a food critic arrives unannounced, when Andy's personal demons surface in the middle of service — there are no cuts, no escape, no breathing room.

It's the anti-food-porn film. The food is gorgeous, but the camera barely lingers on it because there's no time. In a real kitchen, you don't admire your plate — you fire it and move on. Boiling Point captures that relentless forward motion better than anything before or since.

Pig (2021) — Grief and Truffles

Michael Sarnoski's Pig was marketed as "Nicolas Cage's John Wick — but with a truffle pig." The reality is nothing like that. It's a quiet, devastating meditation on loss, authenticity, and what food means when stripped of ego.

Cage plays Robin Feld, a legendary Portland chef who disappeared into the Oregon wilderness to hunt truffles with his beloved pig. When the pig is stolen, Robin returns to the city — not for revenge, but to find his only friend. Along the way, he encounters the restaurant world he abandoned, and in the film's most powerful scene, he cooks a specific dish from memory for a former protégé who has sold out to molecular gastronomy.

The dish is simple. It's something the protégé's mother used to make. And it breaks the man completely. Pig argues that the highest purpose of food isn't innovation or Instagram likes — it's the ability to reach into someone's past and pull out a memory so vivid it undoes them. It's the same thesis as Ratatouille's flashback scene, but rendered with live-action gravity.

Parasite (2019) — Ram-don and Class Warfare

While technically a 2019 film, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite defined the 2020s conversation about food and class in cinema. The ram-don scene — where the wealthy Mrs. Park demands that the housekeeper prepare jjapaguri (a cheap instant noodle dish) but with expensive sirloin steak — is a masterclass in using food as social commentary.

The dish itself became a global phenomenon. Korean grocery stores sold out of the noodle brands featured. Cooking blogs published hundreds of recipes. But the point isn't the recipe — it's the contradiction. Cheap noodles with expensive steak. A rich family's version of "slumming it" that still costs more than a poor family's weekly grocery budget. Every bite of that ram-don tastes like class warfare.

The Bigger Picture: Why Now?

Why did the 2020s produce such a radically different kind of food cinema? Several forces converged. The pandemic shut down restaurants worldwide, and millions watched their favorite places die. That collective grief made us more interested in the human stories behind our meals. We didn't just miss the food — we missed the people who made it.

Simultaneously, the "hustle culture" reckoning hit the restaurant industry hard. Exposés about toxic kitchen cultures, wage theft, and the mental health crisis among chefs made the public hungry (no pun intended) for honest portrayals. The Bear's PTSD-in-the-kitchen scenes resonated because millions of service industry workers recognized them instantly.

There's also a social media dimension. In the 2010s, food was aspirational — perfect latte art, immaculate brunch spreads, restaurants designed for the 'gram. By the 2020s, audiences were tired of the performance. They wanted the mess behind the beauty. Films like The Menu satirized exactly this fatigue, and audiences devoured it.

What's Cooking Next?

The 2020s aren't over, and the food film renaissance shows no signs of cooling down. The Bear continues to set viewership records. Films exploring food culture from non-Western perspectives are gaining global audiences. The line between food documentary and narrative film is blurring, with hybrid projects that follow real chefs and restaurants while telling cinematic stories.

What's clear is that we've moved permanently past the era of food-as-decoration. The 2020s proved that audiences want food storytelling with teeth — stories that respect the craft, acknowledge the cost, and still find beauty in the simple act of making someone a meal. Whether it's Carmy's beef sandwich, Slowik's deconstructed s'more, or Robin Feld's memory-unlocking dish, the message is the same: food is never just food.

The kitchen is the new frontier of serious storytelling. And we're all watching — hungry for more.