The Chef's Kiss
Term Three: Food For Thought; Module 3
Thesis: Food is a language of courtship, devotion, and emotional reckoning. Across literature and media, food enables us to express seduction and control, and helps shape the ways we navigate intimacy, heartbreak, and identity. Like a perfectly timed breakup post, food writing can be confession, revenge, or desire—served up one dish at a time.
A carefully plated seduction, a shared bite that lingers, a last supper before everything falls apart. Food is never just food—it’s a love language, a power play, a desperate attempt to hold onto something fleeting. In literature and film, we don’t just eat; we hunger, we savor, we starve. A lover cooks to be desired, a heartbroken woman stirs a pot just to feel in control. Writing about food is another form of confession— if you can’t say 'I love you' or 'I miss you,' at least you can make a recipe you once shared, or lose yourself in a complex new one.
Taste Me
Desire is often a matter of taste. A well-prepared meal, like a well-played romance, relies on anticipation, indulgence, and restraint. In Sweetbitter, Tess learns that appetite and intimacy are intertwined, that taste itself can be a seduction. Leaving behind her Midwestern roots to move to New York, she longs for experience, something she finds in a downtown restaurant—and in Jake, the bartender she quickly falls into a complicated situationship with. In between learning how to shuck oysters and how to pair wine with each entrée, she discovers that taste is about more than flavor—it’s about power, about surrender. Every sip, every bite is a performance, a ritual of attraction that mirrors her growing obsession with Jake.
“I wanted to bite him. I wanted him to shock me. I wanted everything I’d never had.” (Danler, page 79) Even the language of her desire is laced with hunger – her attraction for Jake is inseparable from her craving for new tastes and experiences. Food carries the weight of longing; it’s the slow burn of a meal shared across candlelight, the tension of a lover feeding another a bite, a secret language spoken through spice and sweetness.
In Like Water for Chocolate, food is more than metaphor—it is desire made tangible. "The heat that was invading her body was so intense that she felt like she was melting, in the pure and simple ecstasy of love." (Esquivel, page 112) Tita’s sauces and cakes are infused with longing, each meal a stand-in for her forbidden love for Pedro. Cooking becomes her confessional, a way to express what she cannot say aloud.
Food is used throughout courtships – from a first date at a restaurant, nervously making small talk and learning about each other’s siblings over appetizers and drinks, to the quiet intimacy of cooking together, hands brushing as you chop herbs, laughter bubbling over a simmering pot. There’s a shift from the performative to the deeply personal—the difference between ordering for someone at a restaurant and knowing exactly how they take their coffee in the morning. To cook for someone is to care for them, to say without words: I see you, I know you, I want to nourish you.
Through Tess’s obsession with taste and touch and Tita’s ability to turn emotion into sustenance, food becomes the most intimate language of all—one spoken in spices and sweetness, in the heat that lingers long after the last bite.
Hunger Games
But while desire drives us to indulge, food also holds a darker side—the power to restrict, to impose control over both the body and emotions. The act of eating (or refusing to eat) becomes a way to impose order on chaos, to manage the unmanageable. Sometimes, the only thing more powerful than indulgence is restraint.
In Milk Fed, Rachel has spent her entire life measuring, withholding, cutting herself down to a manageable size. Food is math, discipline, a way to keep herself in check.
“All that mattered was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it.”
Then she meets Miriam, who eats with abandon, who treats food as pleasure rather than punishment. For Rachel, letting go—of rules, of guilt, of the need to control every bite—is as intoxicating as falling in love itself, and makes her relationship with Miriam that much more complex.
Milk Fed is a novel about hunger in all its forms—literal, emotional, spiritual. Rachel’s calorie counting isn’t just about food; it’s a way to shrink herself into something acceptable. Her relationship with Miriam isn’t just romantic; it’s an experiment in relinquishing control, in seeing what happens when she stops holding herself back.
Meanwhile, in Butter, control manifests through obsession. The novel follows a journalist investigating a chef accused of murder, a woman whose command over food mirrors her command over others. Here, eating is not just about sustenance but about dominance and manipulation—who eats, how much, who gets to indulge, and who is denied. Food, in this case, is a tool of control in relationships, an unsettling reminder that appetite and autonomy are often tangled in ways that go far beyond the plate.
Eat Your Heart Out
Our relationship with food shifts in the aftermath of heartbreak, when stability is no longer a given. A bad breakup can leave you unable to eat, your appetite dulled by grief, or just as easily send you spiraling into the comfort of childhood foods—a dinner of Frosted Flakes, a spoonful of peanut butter straight from the jar, ice cream for breakfast because, honestly, it feels like nothing matters. When the person who once felt like home is gone, it makes sense that your eating habits become unmoored too. Hunger becomes unpredictable, chaotic. Some days, food is a lifeline; other days, it’s an afterthought. Either way, eating is never just about eating—it’s an attempt to fill a void, to regain a sense of control, or maybe just to feel something again.
And what does it mean to cook for someone who might not love you back? In Heartburn, food is Rachel’s last remaining tether to her marriage, a way to pretend everything is still intact even as it crumbles. In a life that’s unraveling, recipes offer structure. Measurements are precise, steps are clear, and unlike love, a well-made dish follows a predictable formula. Even her famous vinaigrette recipe, recounted with biting humor, becomes a kind of emotional armor—a small but deliberate act of control in a world where everything else is slipping through her fingers.
The vinaigrette in Heartburn is more than just a recipe—it’s a form of memoir, a way of saying this is what I gave you, and this is how you repaid me. It reminds me of the way people might post songs from their ex’s favorite playlists after a breakup, turning shared history into something public, something coded.
And as always, life imitates art. In the midst of a messy public divorce, the Daily Mail reported that actress and director Olivia Wilde’s husband, Jason Sudeikis, allegedly threw himself in front of her car to stop her from leaving with her now-infamous salad dressing, intended for her rumored lover, Harry Styles. In a sly, almost poetic response, Wilde posted page 177 of Heartburn to her Instagram Stories—the vinaigrette recipe—letting it speak volumes without a single word of her own.
Like food, love leaves traces—whether in the muscle memory of a shared recipe, the phantom taste of a once-beloved dish, or the quiet, somewhat defiant satisfaction of knowing that even if the love is gone, the vinaigrette remains. It’s a mark of what once was, a piece of intimacy that’s both irrevocably altered and yet, in some way, still yours.