Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Courtesy of @meals.on.reels.
Though your Instagram feed may be overflowing with food accounts documenting unattainably lavish meals, or you’ve recently had to mute the myriad of Instagrams cataloguing vintage film icons, it has to be said that there’s a gap in the market for accounts that fuse food and film together. Filling that gap is New-York based film critic Kristen Yonsoo Kim, whose Instagram account, @meals.on.reels, chronicles the best food scenes from cult films. From the sticky raspberry syrup of a young girl’s ice cream in the 1999 film, Ratcatcher, to the grotesque brain spaghetti served in Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage (1972), this account records the epicurean delight as well as the visceral strangeness of food on film.
Selecting her images from an archive of film stills sourced from the depths of tumblr, Kim started the account in September 2017 after deciding that her hoard of screen-grabbed treasures should be shared with the world. The inspiration for the name of the account arose during a viewing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: “There’s that scene where Laura Palmer says she ‘can’t do Meals on Wheels that day’.”
Whether you get your kicks from over-indulgent scenes of decadence like Burt Lancaster asking Susan Sarandon for a dozen oysters in Atlantic City (1980), or from scenes infused with sensuality as seen in the morning milk scene from Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992), or from more playful surrealist scenes like the one in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) where Tilda Swinton sucks idly on a blood popsicle, @meals.on.reels has it all. Inspired by the extent of her knowledge, we asked the curator to select her favourite moments of food in film that an exude dreamlike surrealness.
1. The Other Side of Hope (2017)
“Aki Kaurismaki’s color-coordinated set pieces have a surreal feel to them, and the headquarters of his latest film is a restaurant that has no idea what it’s doing. At one point, they rebrand into a Japanese joint that serves an absurd amount of wasabi—sure to give you a hallucinatory headache.”
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
“A simple “no thank you” will suffice, but David Bowie slaps the shit out of a pan of cookies, which somehow go flying into the sky (??).”
3. Empire of Passion (1978)
“Many of Nagisa Oshima’s films have haunted me but few so literally as Empire of Passion. Like, imagine killing off your husband to be with your lover only for his dead ass to come back and eat your sweet potatoes?”
4. Friday Night (2002)
“In a film that’s achingly textured with very tangible romantic gestures, the few moments of magical-realism, such as the anchovies and olives rearranging themselves to form a smile on a pizza pie, renders Claire Denis’s film even more dreamy.”
5. Norbit (2007)
“I think about this high-key thicc turkey every Thanksgiving.”