For some, home is a plate of kimchi and white rice. For others, its borscht, a warm cup of tea, beef bourguignon, or tamales. Such preferences are not only personally meaningful but culturally significant as well. These meals map who we are, where we come from, and what happened along the way. Certain meals can act as a way to retain an extensive heritage or as a way to embrace new ones. Ingredients, methods of preparation, and techniques vary through cultures, yet food manages to give us a look into the way we view ourselves. Louise Fresco, the world’s leading advocate for sustainable food production, once said, “food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It’s about honesty and identity”. Food plays a substantial role in Alfonso Arau’s film ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ and Lasse Hallstrom’s ‘Chocolat’. The two films revolve around the struggle of adapting to traditions and utilize the preparation of food to depict this idea. Both stories take place in areas where tradition and ritual are fundamental. One film takes place at the turn of the 20th century in Mexico and the other in a small, very catholic French village called Lansquent-sous-Tannes in 1959. Yet the two main characters, Tita and Vianne, discover the difficulty of living up to their traditions and fail to acclimate as they go those around them. As a result, the food cooked by the two women functions as a physical means of expressing a complex range of their struggles and emotions. Instead of inspiring comfort and stability within their lives, both woman’s traditions hold them back from their true potential, leaving them to be relegated into the category of nurturer and caretaker. However, it is Tita’s and Vianne’s modernized visions and vivacious personalities that helps them break free from their traditional binds and, thereby, allow their food to help them change themselves and act as mediators to change the community around them.
Tradition is an integral part of any culture. It especially plays a significant role in Mexican culture. One of the most critical factors of their philosophy stems from the ritual of preparing and then eating food. Another vital element of Mexican culture is familial traditions. These two ideas are essential foundations in the film ‘Like Water for Chocolate’. Tita, a strong, vivacious young girl, is bound to a life of servitude to her mother. Tradition states that within a Spanish-blood family, the youngest daughter must never marry and instead care for her mother until their death. However, Mama Elena uses humiliation and violence to obtain complete obedience from Tita. For example, when Tita does not obey her mother’s wishes, Mama Elena violently whacks her across the face with a wooden spoon causing blood to gush from Tita’s nose and mouth. Tradition acts, in many ways, as the story’s antagonist in the film. Even though Elena is primarily the one who enforces the traditions, creating obstacles for Tita, it’s the traditional view of the family that is Tita’s main force to fight. There is no conceivable way for Tita to rearrange her place in the family, ultimately sealing her fate before she was even born. The idea of defying this tradition is not only disrespectful to her family, but it is also a stain on her moral and spiritual makeup. Therefore, tradition restrains Tita’s freedom from her mother, her lifestyle, and even her own wishes.
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However, Tita also manages to use her family’s traditions to her advantage. As her mother’s caretaker and as a woman, she is obligated to cook meals for the family consistently. Since food is an integral part of Mexican culture, Tita, inadvertently, becomes the focus of her family because she is the one who prepares all the food. This closeness to her meals is seen from the first scene in the film when Tita entered the world, “…prematurely, right there on the kitchen table amid the smells of simmering noodle soup, thyme, bay leaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and of course, onion”. Tita’s connection to food only grows stronger throughout the film, and while cooking with her family’s ancient recipes, she adds her own modern twists. This act gives Tita a small sense of power in a world where she consistently has none. Her perseverance for control and self-discovery gives her food magical properties that affect all those around her. Her “traditional, exotic dishes imbue others variously with love, happiness, grief, desire, and even disease, depending on Tita’s state as she prepares them”. For example, when cooking a cake for Pedro’s and Rosaura’s wedding, Tita’s tears for her unobtainable love and the passion she feels for her sisters betrothed stain the batter. This new element gives the confectionery a whole new meaning that only Tita understands. When the family and their friends eat the cake, they suddenly are filled with an unexplainable sense to be with the one they love and then immediately are struck with violent illness. Unconsciously, Tita’s food evokes her feelings onto everyone around her, even her mother, forcing Elena’s humanity to escape from her cold exterior as she rushes to look at a picture of her dead husband.
The kitchen inevitably becomes a veritable reservoir of creative and magical events in which the cook who possesses this talent becomes an artist, healer, and at times even a demolisher. When Tita’s sister, Rosaura, tries to cook a meal following the recipe perfectly, it turns out terrible. However, when Tita cooks the meal, she follows a strict ritual. She meticulously cares for the ingredients, such as placing the chicken in a perfectly lined order, grinding rose petals with her hands, and methodically sprinkling every spice. The combination of the ritual preparation and her pure joy in the kitchen leaves everyone at the dinner table filled with a supernatural sensual sensation after consuming the meal. Therefore, cooking doesn’t just involve following traditional recipes, but something personal and emanating from the chef: a magical quality that transforms the food and grants its powerful properties that go beyond physical satisfaction to provide spiritual nourishment as well.
Similarly, the film ‘Chocolat’ also battles the notion of a ‘traditional family lifestyle’. Vianne Rocher, the main protagonist, breaks the social norms of the women of Lansquent-sous-Tannes. She is an independent and outspoken single mother who opens a chocolaterie - right during the time of Lent. The townsfolk do not respond favorably to “fleshly temptation and indulgence”. The mere thought of a woman who takes care of herself and her child rattles the entire community. Vianne’s willingness to break the formalities of tradition represent social change: how could a conservative and well-established village accept a single, vivacious mother and, top it off, to allow her to open a business that encourages self-indulgence?. Vianne, the daughter of Chitza, a Mayan woman who cannot stay anywhere too long, is possessed by the same impulses. She is bound by the tradition to consistently move from town to town whenever the “north winds blow”. The legacy of her tribal culture causes not only a rift with her daughter but within her as well. Yet again, tradition acts as the antagonist, forcing Vianne to confront her ingrained traditions and to achieve self-actualization within herself.
However, while in the film ‘Like Water for Chocolate’, Tita uses her food to obtain independence and freedom from her culture and family, Vianne uses her chocolates to find one instead. Always moving around has left her and her daughter, Anouk, without anything stable to cling to. Both mother and daughter yearn to be a part of something greater, even if the townsfolk want nothing of the sorts. Vianne uses the magical properties in her chocolates to familiarize herself with the community. According to Helene A. Shugart, Vianne’s food is symbolic of her Aztec roots, and French nature as seen by the mystical Mayan revolving disk sits on the counter of Vianne’s chocolaterie. Customers spin “spin the disk and say the first thing they see. Based on what they describe, Vianne divines, with unfailing accuracy, what their favorite confection will be” (Shugart). Her chocolates bring people together and help others discover parts of themselves; they did not even know existed.
By finding herself, Vianne also brings the community together through a mutual “appreciation of chocolate and a greater understanding of earthly and physical pleasures”. In her article ‘The Cook, the Mediator, the Feminist, and the Hero’, Jennifer Schulz articulates the persuasive power that food possesses in terms of mediation in the film ‘Chocolat’, specifically focusing on the role concerning Vianne’s strong charisma within the film. Cooking and mediation are both very historically feminine characteristics. Shultz argues that while Vianne’s food is essential to her development, it is not her primary role; in fact, it is to act as a facilitator. The chocolaterie disguises her underlying motivations. Vianne’s use of chocolate “extols the virtues of women maintaining their ambitions and uses them to fundamentally change the relations of dominance and subordination around her” (Schultz). Vianne’s work as a mediator truly changes the “relations of dominance and subordination” (Schultz) everywhere around her. For example, through the use of her chocolate, Vianne helps mediate Josephine’s development from a battered, fragile wife into a strong, independent woman. Another example revolves around Armande’s birthday party. Vianne’s prepares a meal so fantastic that solidarity between the guests is unavoidable. Instead of unwillingly avoiding any contact the riverboat gypsies, the townspeople eat, dance, and rejoice in accord with one another. Armande’s birthday party “represents the first time this newfound community is shown, as well as the penultimate shift for Vianne from ‘other’ to an insider” (Shultz) within Lansquenet.
In conclusion, both films, ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ and ‘Chocolat’, emphasize the importance of well-prepared food, which not only acts as a vehicle for expressing the problems and emotions of the main characters, but also changes them and the communities around them.
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