On Dandadan and understated, symbolic meals
In big-budget blockbusters and It Girl mangas alike, sitting down for food and drink can act as a kind of checkpoint. Meals live somewhere between the foreground and the back: illusory, heavenly.
I shouldn’t be surprised at this point that whatever movie I’m watching, book I’m reading, or comic I’m devouring I linger over whatever food appears throughout the story. I ask myself what it’s doing there, at that part of the narrative, and why.
It happened again in the newly trendy Dandadan, a manga and anime put out by kingmaker Shōnen Jump. I paused after getting some 70 issues deep when I realized two things: 1) writer and illustrator Yokinobu Tatsu sometimes breaks with the style of the surrounding panels to draw super detailed images of food and 2) after a story arc, a meal at grandma Seiko Ayase’s house sets the stage for the ever-swelling cast of characters to eat and be merry.
I love shit like that. I love food, meals, and eating living somewhere between background and foreground.
Because I’m not talking about food as character work, like the famous Reservoir Dogs diner dialogue demo where these terrible crooks shoot the shit just like anyone else over shitty diner fare. I’m not talking about food as the centerpiece, either, like the criminally under-appreciated Taste of Things where romance and commitment simmer in the heart of the film.
I am talking about food as touchstone, a reminder to the reader that here, in whatever weird or despicable world these characters may find themselves, there is life. There are people who must eat, people who must remain, people who must live with the living.
Back to Dandadan. Food takes on this role slow and sure. The main thrust of the story is how the conspiratorial worlds of aliens and spirits begin to overlap in crazy ways. There’s nothing overt about food and drink in the scope of the show. As one reads, it becames apparent a number of the main characters don’t ever really go to their own houses, just Seiko’s. And the meals she prepares or orders — takoyaki, bento boxes, milk so an alien shrimp can feed his child — are the only times we see the cast eating for a long time.
Grandmas play a much larger role in this universe than that, though. For the young Japanese heroes on Earth, Seiko’s cooking is this checkpoint, a save screen. For an alien named Vamola, a survivor of interplanetary colonization, her rescuer is a grandma named Ms. Benga. This cranky elder was the cook for a royal palace before the invasion, and she says her hands were honed to make “food that people would be happy to eat,” not to kill. Right before Vamola is going to be eaten, as she and a few “grannies” make a break to get off-planet, the final vision of her life that flashes before her eyes is of a small camp meal, those same grannies wafting the aroma of their humble meal toward them, savoring.
And sure enough when yokai fend off another alien doomsday in outstanding fashion, yakiniku barbecue is awaiting the characters at Seiko’s Kamigoe City home.
Food appears in the same frequency but in a much different capacity in other wunderkind manga-animes. In Attack on Titan’s first fatal episodes, a young, hungry woman named Sasha trains to be a doomed soldier. Coming from a district within the besieged walled cities of this terrible land, she now loves plain ol’ bread and potatoes. When she offers to share her food, she’s punished, made to run all day and night. In a war where death is being literally eaten by gigantic homunculus-esque enemies, ever-rarer meals serve as vestiges of a long-forgotten normalcy.
There are a few portions of the moveable feast that is One Piece that echo this forsaken symbolism. It’s also insanely cool the world’s most popular ongoing story is undoubtedly anti-imperial. Unlike Dandadan, there is an obvious connection to food. That essay’s been written and it would be regarding Sanji, the crew’s chef, and his many overt discussions, philosophies, or actual meals made having very literally to do with food.
Instead note the Wano arc of the story, issues 909 through 1057. Here the events are kicked off by main character Monkey D. Luffy receiving a gift from a girl named Tama. She gives him a scant portion of rice; It’s the most she eats all year, since the tyrant Kaido has depleted the island of food production. Moreover, the town of plagued peasantry she lives in is called Leftovers. One of the primary villains in this arc is named Big Mom. She, alternatively, comes from a land called Whole Cake Island. Basically everything there is edible, buildings are made of chocolate. Luffy eventually gifts Tama an apple in return. “By the time we leave this country,” he vows, “it’ll be a place where you can eat as much as you want, every single day!!!”
It doesn’t take a literature professor to determine those potatoes, the apple act as reminders of poverty. In that same spirit, this is much how whiskey makes a stage left appearance in Of Mice and Men.
Life sucks for hobo heroes George Milton and Lennie Small. If they had it their way, they’d be living in a queer socialist paradise, inclusive of elderly folk with disabilities and Black people alike, tending to rabbits and fruit, hitting the circus whenever they want. In Steinbeck’s short play-book, that vision never materializes. While waiting for their come up, though, whiskey will do.
When asking about the boss at the new ranch where they’ve just arrived, the old man on site says he’s decent enough to set out a big jug on Christmas. That means something special here since in the first chapter we learn of George’s hope to work through a gallon himself, if he didn’t have to take care of Lennie. He can’t believe how lucky he is to have this new chapter unfolding before him, briefly ignoring his ongoing concern Lennie will ruin this chance at a new life. He asks the old man again about that Christmas whiskey. “Yes sir. Jesus, we had fun,” he replies.
There may be nothing more bracing than hot, huge chunks of meat. After a crushing defeat, after getting devastated well beyond the scope of human survival, Luffy can only truly recharge with a cornucopia of non-descript red meat, usually with a bone javelining through the middle. (In comparison, this “eat to regain your fighting power” scene only happens once in Dandadan, though I’ve only read up to chapter 119!) It’s as much a defining component of his character as Winnie the Pooh loves honey. It’s a periphery but critical component of the tale.
There’s something to this background, subliminal healing power of a meal. Godzilla’s most critically acclaimed foray showcases the merits of food as spiritual and communal replenishment, too. In Godzilla: Minus One the cast works to rebuild Tokyo from the United States’s under-discussed firebombing, covered well by Dan Carlin and Malcom Gladwell. I was watching the movie while working at Eater and couldn’t help but pull out my Notes app: the traumatized characters almost only have emotional conversations over food. On tiny grills beneath tents in the ruinous streets, the shell-shocked vets construct a monster-fighting strategy — and new lives — over hot pot and slurps of sake.
Perhaps my favorite, most intense reaction to such a device came in Twin Peaks. Fans of the show, the Pacific Northwest, or coffee already know what’s coming. Yes, there are the doughnuts that garner more attention for the small town sheriffs than they may otherwise. Cherry pie gets an elevated status, becomes the stuff of angels. But it’s coffee that moves from prop to lodestone, like the always-drunk-black brew were spouting from the Northern Washington forests instead of a Mr. Coffee.
It’s all hella Virginia Woolf. The writer nails the vibe in The Waves, lionizing the simple nature of a thing, the texture everyday rituals provide to our own sense of self. “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
I memorized that quote when I encountered it for the first time. It was the kind of stoic badass energy I wanted to apply to food and drink; I wanted to get at that fundamental frequency behind the scenes.
The night after I got married, my homie Andy came over to our house in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset. Everyone was spent, flat-out tired. The few friends who were still around lolled in the living room with my wife and I while Andy cooked. He said he wanted to prepare everyone something to eat. Little did we know he ended up cooking a four-course meal of all kinds of phenomenal Chinese fare. I devoured noodles, stir-fry, salad, cream and spice duetting through each dish.
Of that wedding weekend — including the center-stage desserts at the reception, the farewell dim sum brunch on the beach — I can’t help but remember Andy’s meal, cooked in almost total quiet on a foggy August evening. It was a waypoint, a check-in, almost out of a story. “Food’s not something to be taken light,” Seiko tells her granddaughter. “Living begins with eating.”
