When I lived in Japan one of my apartment mates, a Korean man a few years older than me, was obsessed with food, always working on some new dish in our kitchen with a foreign cooking show on his laptop. He never watched the Japanese programs even though they would often come on TV, because for whatever credentials the judges boasted, their job was clearly to laud praise on whatever small restaurant or chef they happened to be focused on that day. They used different words and compliments every time, to be sure, but how could anyone get a sense of how different dishes compare to one another when the most important part of the tasting was the mandatory “it’s good!” to start it off? Seeing Japanese cooking specials for a while makes me acutely aware of where Food Wars! draws inspiration from. With visual metaphors and in-depth descriptions of food they could bring the art of excessive meaningless compliments to its highest form, but the result is still excessive meaningless compliments, and it quickly becomes overbearing.
The structure of the show is the same as a sports show, or alternatively a shounen action series, with tournament arcs and special techniques abound. The son of a small restaurant owner, Yukihira Souma (whose name conveniently contains the Japanese character for “eat”) works with his father in the kitchen until his father leaves home abruptly to send him to the number one culinary school in Japan, a merciless program filled with the best young chefs from around the globe, who struggle every day to produce food at the level of a top restaurant to avoid being expelled. He has an overly laid-back but competitive attitude, and on orientation day he announces to the school that he will take the top spot of the school without difficulty, and that no food enthusiasts can measure up to someone who has been working in the kitchen since they were born.
Of course he also runs into people who, surprise, have worked just as hard as him, from the country bumpkin Megumi to the Italian Aldini brothers to the world-renowned Erina, whose tasting has been called godly. If it sounds like all the characters are being pidgeonholed into a one-dimensional archetype, that’s because they are. One is the master of smoke, one the master of meat, master of spices, master of chemistry, master of medicine—the list goes on. Souma is so ill-defined that he competes with all of them at their level, because his try-hard attitude, experimental nature, and natural genius allow him to overcome these seasoned—albeit equally ill-defined—specialists. The school has a system called a Shokugeki, where students can challenge each other to thematic cook-offs judged by professionals, and where everything from ingredients to property to enrollment can be put on the line. Again, we never see a named character fail to turn out perfect reception from the judges, and so judging a winner feels arbitrary, other than knowing that Souma eventually has to win.
And there is another aspect to this perfect reception, far more pernicious and irritating, namely the oversexualization of eating food. Good food is indeed a full-body experience, and it’s no surprise that some people would compare a good meal favorably against good sex. Still, people take one bite of food and their clothes suddenly explode as they let out a sexual moan and the dish in question streams across the screen in the background. Some of these metaphors are funny, from a duck singing an aria to a kiss from an apple prince waking up Sleeping Beauty. Yet the repetitiveness of these images is overbearing, and three episodes in it no longer has any power to showcase just how marvelous their food really is. It is funny to see the men subjected to the same treatment as the women, avoiding the obvious double-standard in sexual fan service, but eventually it just comes to mean that these scenes are twice as long and twice as irritating.
I do like the dynamic between Souma and his father, who turns out to be a world-class chef who travels on behest of the greatest restauranteurs around the globe, thus in some way justifying Souma’s skills, his precociousness, and his competitive nature. They have been facing off since Souma was very young, and they constantly create the most absurd foul combinations together in search of better food (not that anyone expects squid tentacles soaked in peanut butter to be the next great culinary frontier). While his father seems like an exaggerated portrait of a reclusive eccentric genius, very reminiscent of Ging Freecss, his parenting certainly explains the slightly more believable Souma, and makes for good comedic and professional interactions. Unfortunately his appearances are limited to the introduction episode and a useless two-episode arc near the middle of the show. Maybe I like him because it makes Souma slightly more grounded and likeable by comparison.
Food Wars! also falls into the trap of taking on too much. When it begins there is one goal: for Souma to earn the academy’s top seat before going back to his family diner. Soon there is a school training camp to overcome, a competition amongst the first-years, a quest to revive the dying shopping district in his hometown, and other distractions introduced in the same episode they become the centerpiece for the new arc. When these challenges appear one by one in a linear fashion, clearly setting up for a second season, and perhaps a third season after that, what goal are we looking towards after all? Food Wars! is quintessentially shounen in that it continues to introduce new obstacles to desperately hang on to its fifteen minutes of fame. There is a semblance of development for Megumi and possibly for Souma, but overall it is an endless repetition of past events, a stale extension of what we have already seen. With this style the story doesn’t make me excited with anticipation, much in the same way that the presentation of the food doesn’t make me hungry, and if neither of those are there for a cooking shounen, what’s left?