Can I have the recipe?

From the luscious banquet in Babette's Feastto the burgers in Pulp Fictionand the spaghetti sauce in Goodfellas, food plays a vital role in many films. DONALD CLARKEpulls up a chair and tucks in

WHAT IS OUR view of food in cinemas? Well, obviously, not being monsters, we remain violently opposed to the idea. For decades we’ve had to endure the sickening, mildewed stench of popcorn. In recent years, multiplexes have invited punters to consume hotdogs (flavoured with the finest pink) and absurdly complex nacho platters (a tub of orange Plasticine beside a pot of cold tomato soup) within their increasingly bland establishments. Ignore all those malcontents who retch when remembering smokers in mainstream cinemas. If the current trend continues, the chap beside you will soon be carving a joint of lamb while waiting for the main feature to begin.

Oh hang on. The subject for discussion is food in cinema. Well, it's always been there. One of the most famous early experiments in film theory saw Lev Kuleshov, the great Russian film-maker, interposing shots of a man's face with images of a girl, a coffin and a bowl of soup. The face was the same in each case. But, whereas the actor seemed lascivious when apparently contemplating the girl and sad when staring at the coffin, he appeared hungry when supposedly eyeing up the food. One hundred years ago we learnt that just displaying food alters the meaning of a scene.° Charlie Chaplin ate his boot in The Gold Rush.Jimmy Cagney shoved a grapefruit into Mae Clark's face during The Public Enemy. The Marx Brothers didn't consume duck soup in Duck Soup. Few great films get by without having something to do with comestibles.

When attempting an analysis of eating in cinema, the temptation is always to celebrate those films that revel in the deliciousness of food and its power to bring people together. One might argue that (like painting) cinema is poorly equipped to grapple with the subject. After taste and smell, vision is, after all, only the third most important sense for the expectant diner. Yet dozens of film-makers (and still-life painters, for that matter) have proved up to the task.

Few conversations on the subject get far without mentioning the groaning tables in Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast(1987). Following a spirited woman as, after winning the lottery, she prepares a banquet for her employers and the local gentlefolk, the film features a justifiably celebrated array of stomach-rumbling delicacies: turtle soup, blinis with caviar, quail in pastry, an extravagant rum cake. The feast is positively sexual in its voluptuousness.

The recent Italian film I am Lovelavished almost as much attention on its food sequences as it did on the troubling machinations of a powerful Italian family. Luca Guadagnino, the film's director, modelled the food on dishes served in the celebrated Milanese restaurant Cracco Peck. Pepperoni pizza was conspicuous by its absence.

Other films that make the top 10 for foodies include the fine Big Night(1996), the useless Chocolat(2000) and the excellent Tampopo(1985). Food becomes a metaphor for living. The camera relishes the sheen, the succulence and the colour of its chosen morsels. We are encouraged to leave the cinema salivating. To ponder only the celebration of food in cinema is, however, to take a shallow, superficial approach to the subject. Eating runs through cinema. It helps point out social divisions. It establishes mood. On occasion, it offers film-makers amusing opportunities to revolt the audience.

Consider one of the season's most intriguing movies. Markus Schleinzer's Michaelconcerns an emotionally retarded Austrian paedophile who keeps a young boy imprisoned in his basement. Within the opening 10 minutes we see the perpetrator cooking a meal for his captive. What is this colourless, dry meat that he's frying into oblivion? Our first sight of the obscure, supernaturally unappetising dish confirms that we are about to spend 90 minutes in a supremely unhappy place. The dinner that follows – all icy silences and snapped orders – acts as a horrible perversion of the archetypal family meal. That parody was pushed further in an influential, if still under-appreciated, James Whale film from 1932. A year after making Frankenstein, the director offered audiences a magnificent comic horror entitled The Old Dark House. A group of travellers has ended up at a battered mansion somewhere in the rainiest corner of Wales. The family that inhabits the building is among the most impressively dysfunctional in cinema history. Ernest Thesiger plays the withered, permanently dyspeptic father figure. Eva Moore is his largely deaf, religiously crazed sister. Upstairs an impossibly old man lies dying and a crazed pyromaniac waits to deliver Armageddon.

The centre of the film involves a dinner party from hell. More grey, flabby meat is passed about. Puzzlingly for the contemporary viewer, the mute butler offers vinegar with the grim repast. Thesiger punctuates every tense silence with an enthusiastic offer that seems to have some hidden meaning. “Have a potato,” he snaps. The scene showcases cinema dining at its most tellingly grim. The food is vile. The company is worse. All familial misery is here.

Horror directors have always found ways of bringing food into their cinema. After all, few commonly encountered phenomena have that ability to disgust and delight in equal measure. Watch as your awful child opens his jaws to reveal a mouthful of only partially masticated fish finger. Leave a plate of stew on a table for an hour and it turns from a steaming temptation into a congealed mass. Leave it a bit longer and it becomes a festering heap of putrefaction.

Think of the gnarled innards and greasy organs consumed by another horrific family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre(1974). Even more effective is the rabbit that Catherine Deneuve never gets round to eating in Roman Polanski's Repulsion(1965). As the poor girl goes steadily mad, the unfortunate beast, curled hopelessly on a plate, dries out, begins to stink and eventually accumulates a posse of flies. It's not the subtlest metaphor for madness. But it certainly adds to the growing atmosphere of spiritual decay.

No study of cinematic eating would be complete without a consideration of the connections between food and sex. Terrible films such as 9½ Weeks(1986) attack the subject rather too literally. Considering the amount of grub that Mickey Rourke and Kim Bassinger scoff from one another's bodies in the picture, the couple might as well have spent that titular period making out in the fridge. The famous scene in Tom Jones(1963), during which Albert Finney and Joyce Redman eye each other over a Georgian banquet, begins with subtle glances and ends with scenes that would (almost) shame the rutting Rourke/Bassinger axis. What can Redman be up to when she slowly swallows an oyster and allows Finney to see the slime squirming within her mouth? A slightly more delicate variation on this trope occurs in another Polanski film. Recall Peter Firth, rich cad, feeding strawberries to impoverished Nastassja Kinski in Tess(1979). Sometimes a strawberry is more than just a strawberry.

Here's the message. There is almost no purpose to which food cannot be put in cinema. When, in Goodfellas (1990), Ray Liotta explains that his mother made spaghetti sauce with ketchup, he clarifies that, unlike the majority of his gangster colleagues, he has no Italian blood. Quentin Tarantino's musings on burgers in Pulp Fiction(1994) queasily reveal the extraordinary influence that fast-food culture has on American society. When eight truck-loads of baked beans descend on Ann-Margret in Tommy(1975) it becomes clear that, well, the film must have been directed by Ken Russell.

Everyone eats. Food can be disgusting and delicious. What we eat and who we eat it with says a great deal about what sort of person we are. One may as well discuss the influence of breathing or walking in cinema.

We can, however, have a stab at isolating the perfect food movie. Everyone thinks of Withnail & I(1987) as a film about booze. But grub plays an extraordinary part in that Bruce Robinson comedy. The opening scene finds Paul McGann grimacing at a fried egg in a Camden Town cafe. Later, to emphasise the pals' imprisonment in seediness, Paul brandishes a saveloy in the bath. A period of relative comfort finds them dining on an extravagantly delicious leg of lamb.

A chicken gets strangled and roasted. Pork pies and cake are drunkenly wolfed. The quality of the food mirrors the desperation (or otherwise) of the characters' situation. Forget the Withnail & Idrinking game. Call up the butcher and settle in for the ultimate dining diversion.