This Thanksgiving Weekend, Let Tampopo (1985) Remind You That a Meal Can Be More Than Just Food

This film was requested by Franco Asmaeil, a culture hound who is wise enough to know that movies and basketball are the two best things in this life. The fact that he requested this film should tell you that he is a true cinephile with good taste, even if he is a Warriors fan. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

Yesterday was Thanksgiving.* Which means that, hopefully, most of you just got done sleeping off a food hangover. Heck, I’ve got one right now as I’m writing this.

I really enjoy Thanksgiving because, more than any other holiday, it allows us to not only indulge in good food but consider the role that food plays in our lives. And that’s exactly what Tampopo does, which is why I’m making it an honorary Thanksgiving movie, even though it doesn’t appear to take place in November.

Tampopo is widely considered to be one of the greatest food movies of all time, if not the greatest food movie.** And I can see why. In less than two hours, it covers a lot of ground.

The central story follows a woman named Tampopo who runs a pretty average ramen restaurant somewhere in Japan, and also her customers are really rude to her, and also her son gets beat up a lot. Things aren’t going well for poor Tampopo, and all she wants to do is cook the best ramen that she possibly can.

In swoops not one but five white knights, starting with a dashing truck driver named Goro and continuing with a band of eager foodies who are suddenly (even kinda weirdly) invested in helping Tampopo be the best ramen chef she can be. It’s a very charming and often humorous saga that follows a fairly standard dramatic formula and hits a number of audience-pleasing story beats.

But while Tampopo’s saga is the heart of the film, the subtextual undercurrent is an array of vignettes scattered throughout the film that follow outside characters in a number of food-driven situations. All told together, it’s a sort of meditation on the many roles that food plays in our daily lives.

There’s a sextet of businessmen engaging in a bout of restaurant menu groupthink. There’s a throng of young ladies learning how to eat spaghetti as quietly as possible. There’s a dying woman who makes one last home-cooked meal for her family before kicking the bucket. There’s an old woman who infuriates a grocery clerk by squeezing fresh foods throughout the store. There’s a couple who incorporates various food items into various sex acts. And there’s another couple who does something with an egg yolk that simply cannot be unseen once you’ve witnessed it.***

It’s the sort of thing that begs a deeper examination but also provides some tidy surface-level takeaways. Food can amplify just about any emotion or experience that we come across, from intimacy to healing to grief to acceptance.

And that’s why I love that we stop for a bona fide Food Holiday every year. Because we so often treat food as just a means to an end, shoveling bagged breakfasts while we drive and warming up boxed meals at our offices and carving up dinners in front of the television. Making every meal a moment would be a challenge, but we let go of the community aspect of eating all too often.

A meal can be more than just food. Tampopo knows that. And this week, I hope you all remembered it too.

*I love starting my newsletter by stating the obvious.

**This is according to Franco. But again, he’s a good cinephile, which means that I can trust him and you can too.

*** I’m not going to spoil it, but it’s the sort of scene where I watched it and I thought to myself “I cannot believe they convinced two actors to do that.”

Tampopo is now streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.