--- title: The Hundred-Foot Journey and What If: Movie Food Metaphors description: What do Indian-inflected haute cuisine and Elvis’ favorite sandwich have in common? canonical: https://time.com/3069975/hundred-foot-journey-what-if/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-08T14:00:02.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-21T09:27:47.070Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The Hundred-Foot Journey and What If: Movie Food Metaphors og:description: What do Indian-inflected haute cuisine and Elvis’ favorite sandwich have in common? og:url: https://time.com/3069975/hundred-foot-journey-what-if/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0d47d0c6f8764793/69869e2035ba6fe47cc0343e/hfj-0068.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 068_THFJ_D031_04010FD.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Hundred-Foot Journey and What If: Movie Food Metaphors twitter:description: What do Indian-inflected haute cuisine and Elvis’ favorite sandwich have in common? twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0d47d0c6f8764793/69869e2035ba6fe47cc0343e/hfj-0068.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Meals as Metaphors: Two New Movies Provide Food for Thought  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Aug 8, 2014 2:00 PM UTC  Francois Duhamel—Dreamworks  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Aug 8, 2014 2:00 PM UTC Ismail Merchant’s name is already a noun: Merchant Ivory films, so-called after the production company he cofounded, are synonymous with lavish period pieces. To those who knew him well, though, there’s a verb he could have inspired, too. The British-Indian movie mogul put his kitchen skills good use as a business strategy, says the author Richard C. Morais, who met Merchant some 30 years ago: feed first, ask questions later. “The actor Simon Callow used to say that the term ‘curry favor’ was invented for Ismail,” Morais recalls. So it was that Morais learned an important lesson: food isn’t just for eating. Morais turned that knowledge into his novel _The Hundred-Foot Journey_, about an upstart Indian restaurant that opens across the street from a Michelin-starred French joint, which he hoped Merchant would adapt for the big screen. Though Merchant died before the book was published, _The Hundred-Foot Journey_ hits theaters on Aug. 8, and it won’t be alone in claiming that a meal can be a metaphor. In _Journey_, cooking is culture; in the romantic comedy _What If_, a gigantic sandwich stands in for a relationship — a messy dish for messy love. Elan Mastai, _What If_’s screenwriter, has a theory about why what movie characters eat often means so much — that is, why his blending of peanut butter and jelly and bacon and butter can be more than a heart attack waiting to happen: “These flavors kind of have a built in nostalgia, and it’s also fat and sugar and gluten,” he says. “Put them all together and your body reacts in a very visceral way — and, weirdly, in an emotional way.” Silver-screen sustenance has a long history — _Journey_ director Lasse Hallström was responsible for one of its high points, _Chocolat_ — but the obsession with the kitchen is getting hotter. Both the French import _Le Chef_ and Jon Favreau’s taco-truck passion project _Chef_ arrived in U.S. theaters this summer, after a winter in which _Labor Day_ linked pie and sex and the acclaimed Bollywood film _The Lunchbox_ gave new meaning to “magic beans” by bringing its haricots of happiness (and lots of other love-provoking midday munchies) to American audiences. And as both _The Hundred-Foot Journey_ and _What If_ show, food movies are rarely _about_ food. The former, despite a plot that revolves around restaurant reviews, is actually about tolerance and tradition; the latter is about young love. The _What If_ sandwich, a favorite of Elvis Presley’s known as the Fool’s Gold, shows up as a throwaway reference in the play on which the movie is based, but Mastai ramped up its role when he saw that it echoed the movie’s theme: something can be untidy and delicious at the same time. And the extra layer of meaning Morais gave to the food in _Journey_ was what attracted producer Juliet Blake, who ended up shepherding the story to theaters. Blake tells TIME that the story reminded her of her German mother’s making strudel rather than cake even after she emigrated, and she quotes Adam Gopnik’s book _The Table Comes First_ to explain why: “Food,” he writes, “is the sensual pleasure that translates most readily into a social value.” That’s a lot to ask of cinematic comestibles. Take _The Hundred-Foot Journey_ for example, in which a hint of cardamom can signify the entirety of Indian-ness; it would be unreasonable to expect a meal, however nuanced the taste, to capture the intricacies of something so complicated. Shilpa Davé, author of the book _Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film_, explains that eating and enjoying food is a good step toward intercultural intimacy, but that consumers sometimes need to be reminded that eating the food doesn’t mean knowing everything about the culture. Anita Mannur, author of _Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture_, agrees, saying the potential problem of laying all that meaning on eating is simple: the typical post-_Monsoon Wedding_ depiction of Indian people in films for Western audiences — “colorful and bright and with good food” — doesn’t always leave room for the complications of real life. She read the book of _The Hundred-Foot Journey_ and enjoyed that it made the point that food can remind people of how they don’t belong, but it’s still clear that even the most delicious-looking feast can stumble as a metaphor. “There’s this idea that if we can only just sit down together all the tensions of the world will go away,” Mannur says. “That’s an appealing solution, but it’s unrealistic.” But in Juliet Blake’s case, at least, the unrealistic has proved attainable. The cast and crew of _Hundred-Foot Journey_ ate well on set — the location catering included foie gras — and the film’s star, Om Puri, who plays the patriarch, will make sure the tradition of sitting down together continues. When he comes to New York for the film’s premiere, Blake plans to host him at her Brooklyn home. She says he’s going to teach her how to make Indian food. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3069975/hundred-foot-journey-what-if/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3069975/hundred-foot-journey-what-if/"},"headline":"Meals as Metaphors: Two New Movies Provide Food for Thought","datePublished":"2014-08-08T14:00:02.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-21T09:27:47.070Z","description":"What do Indian-inflected haute cuisine and Elvis’ favorite sandwich have in common?","url":"https://time.com/3069975/hundred-foot-journey-what-if/","keywords":["movies","India","Helen Mirren","Sandwich","daniel radcliffe"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0d47d0c6f8764793/69869e2035ba6fe47cc0343e/hfj-0068.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lily Rothman","jobTitle":"Rothman is managing editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0d47d0c6f8764793/69869e2035ba6fe47cc0343e/hfj-0068.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"068_THFJ_D031_04010FD.jpg","caption":"The Hundred-Foot Journey","creditText":"Francois Duhamel—Dreamworks","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3069975/hundred-foot-journey-what-if/","name":"Meals as Metaphors: Two New Movies Provide Food for Thought"}}]}] ```