In Western cinema, food and drink have often served as symbols for life and sensuality. The enjoyment of food is used to celebrate the pure physical joy of life and sensuality, reminding us of our immediate corporeal sensations, and affirming the vitality of human life. A number of films about food use food imagery in a “carnivalesque” fashion: in BABETTE'S FEAST (Gabriel Axel, Denmark, 1987), the maid of two minister's daughters wins the lottery and spends the entire sum on an elaborate banquet for her Lutheran employers and their church community. In CHOCOLAT(Lasse Hallstrom, UK/US, 2000), a chocolate maker played by Juliette Binoche awakens the residents of a self-restrained French village in the 1950s with her magic chocolates. LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE (Alfonso Arau, Mexico, 1992) is a Mexican fable of a gifted young cook, Tita. Denied the chance to marry her beloved Pedro, Tita acquires the ability to prepare miraculous dishes with outrageous sensual effects on those who eat them. What these films have in common is the way in which food and eating serve to reflect the liberating spirit that is unleashed when the prohibitions within official culture are temporarily suspended.

I shall approach the function of food imagery in film from a different perspective, however. In Eastern cultures (China, to be precise), the significance of food and eating lies not only in the satisfaction of the most basic human instinct, but also, and more importantly, at the heart of social relations. As families are created by the sharing of food and tastes, so is food a representation of family relations. In this chapter, I shall explore the question of how gastronomy figures in the film EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (Ang Lee, 1994). The essay is divided into two parts. In the first part, I shall look at how the representation of food aids us in understanding family relations in contemporary Taiwan, a culture that is characterized by the conflict between the old Confucian virtue of respect towards one's parents and the new Western virtue of seeking individual happiness. This approach is not without its problems, as it suggests that through the senses (in this case, taste) one gains immediate access to otherwise unfamiliar cultural significances.