Food Porn

In films, books and magazines of the past two decades, a forbidden pleasure has been brazenly unveiled. It has been lushly, lovingly photographed, help up either as the antidote to stultifying societies, the source of sensual liberation, or as a passion so terrifying that it annihilates our dignity and reduces our egos to quivering plasma.

I'm not talking about sex -- that's old news. No, the newest source of pop-culture fascination and bawdy celebration is food. In the age of The Zone diet, celebrity wasting syndrome and 24 Hour Fitness, all kinds of media now fancy themselves daring for reveling in the joys of eating and the force of appetite. This month brings us Chocolat, the latest in a long line of food porn, food romance and food confessionals that includes films like Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate and Big Night, books like Isabel's Allende's Aphrodite and Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything, and magazines like Bon Appetite and Savuer.

Lasse Hallstrom's new film Chocolat is a fable about the power of food and pleasure to overcome a small town's puritanical prudery. Juliette Binoche plays Vianne, an exuberant free spirit who wafts into a French village with her young daughter and opens a chocolate shop (during Lent, no less). This outrages the town's fastidious mayor, who vows to drive her out of business and accuses her of being in league with the devil. His pieties are no match for Vianne's confections, though. A cup of her pepper-spiked hot chocolate is enough to awaken the zesty hedonist in her cranky and bitter landlady, while her rose creams spur a broken, abused wife towards blooming emancipation. Romances are born and feuds are resolved. Throughout are luscious, tantalizing shots of swirling pots of melted chocolate, moist cake and earthy crushed cocoa.

Chocolat seems directly inspired by Babette's Feast, a 1987 Danish film about the transcendent power of a gourmet French meal. In that movie, a Parisian woman exiled in a tiny, harsh Danish village wins the lottery and asks her employers, two sweet, timid, pious old maids, for permission to give them one real French dinner for a village celebration. They acquiesce but soon panic, fearing perdition for allowing such flagrant indulgence. Together the townspeople vow to eat the food without noticing it, keeping their thoughts turned heavenward.

Babatte's Feast is a far better film than Chocolat in part because it respects even its most sanctimonious characters, and it doesn't conceive victory as overturning their age-old beliefs. Instead, as the townspeople consume Babette's turtle soup and fine champagne, a glow settles over them and their spirituality is heightened and expanded. Gourmet food here is almost like Ecstasy -- whatever you're doing, it makes it better.

Nevertheless, like Chocolat, the best parts of Babette's Feast are its lingering shots of food being prepared, served and savored. The camera caresses trays of truffle-stuffed quail resting in golden puffed pastry, ruby goblets of red wine and inky caviar. After the relentlessly drab, austere images that dominate the beginning of the film, these shots are their own kind of feast.

What's interesting about these films, as well as Big Night and the scads of food memoirs that line bookstores, is why there's so much drama in simply admitting to the intense pleasures of taste.

On one level, of course, all these delicacies are intended as a metaphor for sex or as a symbol of female sensuality versus male rationality. That's the theme of Allende's 1998 book Aphrodite, a musing on eating and eroticism in which she writes, "The most intense carnal pleasure, enjoyed at leisure in a clandestine, rumpled bed, a perfect combination of caresses, laughter and intellectual games, has the taste of a baguette, prosciutto, French cheese, and Rhine wine."