Young woman eating a “Sputnik” sundae
Don Cravens, “Russia’s Satellite,” Life, Oct 21, 1957
“So much of the narrative unfolds over meals that, as Wang told GQ, during development she was given notes about how repetitive the food scenes were. But why, Wang pointed out, would she have the characters do anything else? For Chinese families like Billi’s […] food is the crux around which we’re oriented, the organizing principle guiding everyday life and interactions. When we greet each other, it’s with a “吃饭了吗？Have you eaten?” Food is an expression of love that in The Farewell is embodied by Billi’s great-aunt affectionately preparing fried stuffed pies (馅饼) for a niece she hasn’t seen in years. Or Billi’s parents saving all their rationed eggs for baby Billi to eat all those decades ago. It looks like the household’s women bustling around the kitchen all day, making the food that will feed their family.” — Jenny G. Zhang
Food in The Farewell (2019) dir. Lulu Wang
““…candied plums, figs, oranges, and apricots with fine gold leaf, and more gold was being smoothed onto sweet biscuits of fried dough cut into witty shapes and drenched in spiced syrup and rosewater.””
— Philip Kazan, “Appetite.” (via lesgardenias)
The original idea of In the Mood for Love is called The Three Stories About Food. So it’s about eating. (x)
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai
“If every epoch has its own odour, the age of witchhunts (contemporary with the cuisine of the late Renaissance and Baroque periods, which favoured the use of vinegar together with sugar, madeira cake with pigeon meat - cooked together in milk and malmsey - were considered a delicious marriage of flavours; or pheasant stewed with pistachio milk and melon seeds, softened with cream, and lemon juice, which commanded widespread and unconditional approval) exhales an unmistakable aura of mutually incompatible essences which are here intermingled, blended, amalgamated to form a surprising and disconcerting mixture. Assa fetida used to be combined with incense, hellebore with myrrh, amber with sulphur, wolf’s heart with marjoram. This was a cuisine in which the meal started with the dessert (sugared pine-kernels, raisins, marzipan, figs) as a deoppilate and aperitive, the prevailing taste being for sweet-and-sour, sugary, honeyed, treacly concoctions, imbuing the whole of the culinary cosmos with an aura of cinnamon, cloves, pepper, mace, and habituating the palate to the same volatile combinations as the organ of smell experiences in its own ultrasensitive realm.”
— Piero Camporesi, tr. Tania Croft-Murray | The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore
be careful on halloween, i just found The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Peter Bruegel the Elder inside this snickers bar