Storyline
Eat Drink Man Woman is a movie following a small family in Taipei, Taiwan in the 90’s. The oldest member is a semi-retired Master Chef named Chu. He has three daughters that live at home with him. Jia-Jen teaches chemistry, Jai-Chien is an airline executive, and Jai-Ning works at a fast food restaurant (Wendy’s). The plot follows the main characters through life and love (or lack thereof) and their regular Sunday dinners together as a family.

Role of Food
Food in this film is shown to be something that you put hard work into with lots of ingredients and different dishes all in together. The taste and traditional aspects of the food such as ginger, family meals, and gender roles, all show up in this film in various aspects. The father is the main cook while the girls clean up afterwards. Dinner is eaten as a family at the dinner table. And the father and daughters all critique each other’s dishes at some point in the movie, the strength of the taste of ginger being one of them. The complex traditional versions of the food are thought to be better than the newer foods in the area as they take more time and use more authentic ingredients and ways of cooking.

Foodways

The meals prepared by Mr. Chu are mainly from scratch and seem to take all day to make. He uses fresh ingredients, like chicken and fish, that he kills and prepares on his own. The film shows a large variety of ingredients for each dish as well as a large amount of dishes, more than what the group could eat. Mr. Chu is partially retired, but still plates the food beautifully and creates amazing dishes. After every dinner, their father goes off to different places while the girls put the leftovers away and clean up the dishes.
The middle daughter, Jai-Chien, and her father are said to not get along. She is in a hurry to move out of the house, but it is not until the middle of the movie that you start to understand why. Jai-Chien used to go to the restaurant with her father and her uncle, Uncle Wren, and spend all day there. She started picking up on the skills of cooking and ended up getting really good. Her father later banned her from the kitchen because women were not known to be high level chefs. Her father instead pushed her towards her studies and she ended up successful in her career at the airline, and even got a promotion offer to move her to Amsterdam. She held a grudge against her father for preventing her from following her dream, though it was unrealistic for that area at the time. There is a scene of Jai-Chien at her boyfriend’s home and she cooks a lavish meal just like her fathers. Cooking way too much for the two of them and looking like something out of a magazine.

Taste

few times through the movie, Mr. Chu comments about beginning to lose his sense of taste, but that never really gets focused on or elaborated on at any point, just mentioned occasionally. It is not until the last scene of the film that it really gets brought up. But first, some back story is needed. Jai-Jen is the eldest and was expecting to stay home with her father and take care of him while the other two girls had excelled with their careers and love lives and left home. Her youngest sister, Jai-Ning, is 20 years old and had accidentally gotten pregnant, so she moved in with the father of the baby immediately. However, Jai-Jen ends up getting married shortly after to the volleyball coach at her school. This left Jai-Chien at home with her father for a time. However, Mr. Chen got married to a family friend who was the same age as his daughters and moved in with her and her daughter. Jai-Chien had one last family dinner but everyone was either busy or not feeling well so only her father showed up. Mr. Chen first tries her soup, which he comments on that the ginger taste is too strong. This slightly upsets Jai-Chien so she tells him it’s not too strong, he is just always shy with the ginger flavor. After a few seconds, you can see on his face that he realizes something and repeats; he thinks the taste of ginger is too strong. Jain-Chien realizes and repeats herself again. He can TASTE the ginger. His sense of taste through the film had been diminishing until it was gone, but he could taste her food, he immediately asked for more in an excited tone. Him and his daughter then shared a heartfelt moment for the first time in the film, in the very last scene of the movie.

Tradition and Authenticity

Mr. Chu goes for a morning run every morning and on one of these mornings he runs into the family friend’s young daughter, Shan-Shan, while she is waiting for the public bus to go to school. When he sees her, he goes up and asks why she is eating at the stop (rather than at home). Shan-Shan says she had to get to school, she is eating the leftover dumplings that Mr. Chu had made the night before. He asked her where her lunch box was and she pulled money out of her pocket that was for her lunch. Mr. Chu then goes home and prepares an amazing looking lunch for Shan-Shan and hurries it to her school. When he arrives, you can see almost all the students in her class eating out of the same white, disposable container for lunch that they had purchased. Mr. Chu brings Shan-Shan the lunch box and shows her what’s in it. All the other students start gathering around in awe of the meal that he had prepared for her.

He then continues to bring her lunches every day and walks with her so she does not have to get on the crowded bus. The movie does not show or elaborate on this, but Shan-Shan mentions her friend buys her lunch every day too, Mr. Chu says two is the same as one so he will make her lunch too. Then later Shan-Shan is taking orders from all her classmates for lunch. However, it is unclear if Mr. Chu was making lunch for everyone, just the two, or just Shan-Shan. Though, the small order slip does not have a lot on it, so it leads one to believe she is sharing her meal with the class and getting their input, but it was never elaborated on. Mr. Chu continued to make Shan-Shan daily lunches and was kept a secret from her mother (who later revealed she knew for a while, but wanted Shan-Shan to have her little secret).
Mr. Chu at one point began talking to a coworker about food, saying

“People today dont appreciate the exquisite art of cooking. After 40 years of Chinese food in Taiwan, the art is lost. Food from everywhere merges like rivers running into the sea. Everything tastes the same!” (1:35:03)

This was interesting to me in this situation as the young children were astounded by these meals, like it was something totally different from what they experience. The art of cooking had been lost through generations and these children were being exposed to something more traditional to Taiwan than what they had seen so far in their lives.
1:35:03 quote

Opinion
It is a little hard for me to fully make an informed decision on this film. It is a film from the mid 90’s in Taiwan and has been translated into English. There were multiple points in the movie that did not make sense in terms of the dialog and scene in the movie, something just seemed off. Maybe the translation to English? There were also a few inaccurate pieces in the movie, such as the reason Uncle Wren got sick and also how he passed away, they did not quite make sense. This makes me wonder if any of the culinary parts, that were shown to be more traditional, are truly accurate. I also am not very familiar with all the traditions and lifestyle in Taiwan, especially in the mid90s, so it is hard for me to judge this movie on that front.
However, the movie was great in terms of showing the food be prepared, mainly by Mr. Chu. It was something that took all day and had so many intricate details for the preparations and showed just how much work he put into those family meals. There were points in the movie where it just showed parts of the kitchen; showing a large variety of tools such as knives, pans, pots, some foods hanging outside, steamers, live animals, etc. This really showed how intricate these meals were and how many steps it took to create them, it was not just throwing it into one pan and you’re done, it was a long line of steps for multiple dishes at once that ended up taking all day to complete

Sources:

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