Food provides nutrition for humans, but food has more needs than one. As Anderson says, “Venues such as cafés, coffee shops, coffee houses, cafeterias, bars, neighborhood restaurants, and other eateries are vital to social life,” food is essential in building up human relationships (Anderson 125). As a social necessity, food exerts itself as more than an excuse to initiate casual talk. In the films, Tampopo and Eat Drink Man Woman, food operates as a medium to preserve human relationships by the consumption and the physical exchange of food. Despite the two films’ different urban settings, food perpetuates parental, romantic, and student-teacher relationships. Food recalls memories of current and past relationships, and these memories revitalize relationships after their deaths.
The dying mother’s vignette in Tampopo shows the preserving of a familial relationship. The father tells his children to eat in order to pay respect to the mother. He says, “Keep on eating. It’s the last meal Mom cooked” (Tampopo). The father uses food to honor the deceased mother. Food becomes a tool to ease the relationship's hardships such as the loss of a loved one and the fact that she is no longer connected with the physical world; however, the heartrending memory of the mother's death associates itself with the fried rice and retains the relationship metaphysically. Anderson asserts, “[the olfactory center] is richly connected to the limbic system, the wellspring of mood and emotionality and a key structure in memory processing. Thus, familiar smells evoke remembered moods in a peculiarly powerful way” (Anderson 77). The eating of the fried rice forms a connection between the mother and the family's memories, and whenever the children and father eat the fried rice again, they recall the mother and the joyful and sorrowful moments associated with her. The mother exists cognitively in the family's minds because of the memories formed by the fried rice. The mother's last dish strengthens and conserves her final feelings and keeps the maternal relationship alive spiritually. Food is not just a means to obtain nutrition but rather a bittersweet reminder of the family's mother.
Food also summons memories of a loved one in Eat Drink Man Woman and maintains a human relationship. In Tampopo, food secures the memories of the maternal relationship so that she is not forgotten, but in Eat Drink Man Woman's last scene, food revives a romantic relationship's memories. Food reinstates sentimental memories and is the utensil that cooks these memories back into Master Chu. When Master Chu says, “Your soup, Jia-Chien . . . I can taste it,” he recalls his former wife, and his memories revive lingering emotions from his previous relationship with her (Eat Drink Man Woman). Those emotions reveal the connection that Mrs. Chu still exists cognitively within Master Chu’s memories. The nostalgic taste of Jia-Chien’s soup evokes Master Chu’s heartfelt memories of...
