Early Food Documentaries, Multiple Modes and Genres

Food as a basic need has played a central role in documentary films as early as the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 view, Repas de bebe (Baby’s Breakfast), but Cricks and Martin’s 1906 nonfiction film, A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works, an industrial process piece that documents tinned biscuit baking, packing, and distribution from start to finish may arguably be the first food documentary. The film provides a glimpse of each step of the process of biscuit making in a British factory, showing workers completing each task with help from bright indoor arc lighting. The film even includes a scene in which workers clean the tins for reuse before a transition to a packing sequence.  

Later documentaries take a more ethnographic approach to food acquisition and preparation, as in Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), and Man of Aran (1934). As Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane note in their book, A New History of Documentary Film, in Nanook of the North, we see Nanook “spearing fish, catching and rendering walrus, [and] hunting seals” (16). In Moana, Moana and his family are seen “snaring a wild boar, collecting giant clams, gathering coconuts, capturing a huge tortoise, making custard, scraping breadfruit, and baking little fish” (16). In Man of Aran, too, food takes the fore in multiple fishing scenes, even though the controversial shark hunt is meant to capture shark livers for fuel instead of food.

Each of these Flaherty films also aligns with Karl G. Heider’s definition of ethnographic film as “film, which reflects ethnographic understanding” (8). As in Nanook of the North (1922) in which archaic Inuit hunting practices are re-enacted to highlight a romanticized more natural state and Cooper and Schoedsack’s Grass (1925) and Chang(1927) which show us how civilization has corrupted the native, Flaherty’s films reconstruct (both literally and figuratively) the stories his subjects tell, providing viewers with a romantic narrative that foregrounds progress. Heider argues that Flaherty and Cooper and Schoedsack’s works “reflect the romanticism of the period” (26).

Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary and Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane’s A New History of Documentary Film expand documentary categories to embrace different modes and genres, all of which are applied in food documentaries. Nichols illustrates his explanation for reflexive documentaries, for example, with an overview of Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1933), a portrait of a remote region of Spain where local peasants fight to survive. His expository category lines up well with interview or talking head documentaries, and his observational documentary aligns with the direct-cinema work. Poetic documentaries, on the other hand, move away from "objective" reality to approach an inner "truth" that can only be grasped by poetical manipulation, as in Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934). According to Nichols, other documentaries are performative, like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004), and stress subjective experience and emotional responses to the world. Food documentaries may have similar perspectives, but their approaches may draw on diverse modes and genres.