Ratatouille and Food as a Love Language
When I was little, I was captivated by Pixar’s Ratatouille. So many things about the movie drew me in–the textures and the colors of the food, the behind-the-scenes rush and pressures of kitchen life, the setting of Paris, and of course, the fiery, motorcycle-riding female chef with a bob as sharp as her kitchen knives.
Image Courtesy: Instagram
The main message behind Ratatouille is the idea that “anyone can cook,” a phrase attributed to the film’s fictional character, Chef Gusteau. But I’d like to talk about the film’s other and more subtle theme, which is that food is a form of love. This idea is never directly stated in Ratatouille, but it permeates throughout the film’s quieter moments, and it is at the center of one of its most famous scenes.
The famous scene in question is when Remy, a rat who loves to cook and the film’s protagonist, serves the food critic Anton Ego the meal ratatouille at the restaurant Gusteau's. Ratatouille is considered to be a peasant dish, one that would be surprising to serve to a particularly harsh food critic at a three star gourmet restaurant–it’s a simple vegetable stew consisting of zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, spices, onions and garlic. Yet in the film, Remy doesn’t dress up the dish or try to reinvent it in order to impress Ego. He simply makes the meal well.
When Ego takes his first bite, he is transported back to a memory from his childhood. In a brief flashback sequence, we see Ego as a young boy who has just hurt his knee from riding his bicycle. To comfort him from his injury, his mother makes him a steaming bowl of ratatouille, which he eats happily. The memory is imbued in warmth. It perfectly captures the feeling that a good meal can give us. Ego is so touched by the memories that the dish resurfaces for him that he asks to meet the chef, which is shocking coming from a previously cold and severe character.
When I first watched this scene as a kid, it influenced me. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but it showed me how food can really mean something. But it wasn’t the only moment in Ratatouille that communicated that to me - the film is full of scenes that display the emotional and sensory significance of food.
There’s the scene where Remy takes a lengthy bite of a strawberry and a chunk of cheese, fully savoring each flavor separately while his voiceover describes to viewers the unique tastes of each ingredient, and then combines the two in one bite to create a totally new flavor. My eyes must have spun out of my head when I first saw this. I was captivated by the animation that floats behind Remy’s head as he chews–the seductive, saccharine red loops of the strawberries, the rich, heady yellow blurs of the cheese, and then the explosive fusion of the two, a fiesta of color and fireworks dancing above Remy’s head, the flavors joining together in a symphony.
Image Courtesy: Instagram
There’s also the moment when Colette (the female chef I mentioned earlier) shows Linguine (the lanky young redhead who Remy puppeteers in the kitchen at Gusteau’s) how to tell if bread is good without tasting it. Colette holds a baguette in between her and Linguine’s heads and tells him it’s all about the sound of the bread. She presses into the baguette and we hear the delicious, crisp sound of its crust crackling.
An even smaller moment that I always appreciated is when Linguine wakes up in his apartment to find that Remy has cooked him breakfast: a fat, yellow, sizzling omelette sprinkled with peppers and herbs. Although this scene is brief, to me it speaks to the larger idea behind the film, which is that food and preparing food means so much more than just keeping ourselves alive. It’s an act of love.
There’s a real intimacy in the give-and-take between a person who cooks a meal and the person who eats that meal. It’s such an everyday exchange that we don’t notice all that it contains–the care, precision, and thoughtfulness behind the preparation of the meal, the attention to how each individual ingredient interacts and behaves. The sensory and textural elements of eating the meal, of tasting how the flavors blend and the satisfaction of being full, of being well fed. Ratatouille is a film that showcases the deep beauty behind that exchange. It reminds us to notice and appreciate the details of something as simple as making or eating a good meal. It reminds us that behind those details, there is often love.
Strike Out,
Georgia Witt
Editor: Maya Kayyal & Jaden Rudd
Saint Augustine
Georgia Witt is a writer for Strike Magazine STA and a freshman at Flagler College. She loves thrifting, going to the movies, reading & writing poetry, and riding her bike. You can reach her at georgiawitt3000@gmail.com or on Instagram @twink3rb3ll_
