Elderly mothers pick pineapple in Taiwanese fields and cook curry rice in a Singaporean hawker stand in Lin Cheng-sheng's biopic, 27°C: Loaf Rock, and Eric Khoo's telefilm, Recipe: A Film on Dementia , respectively. Both 2013 Chinese language films employ flashbacks to portray maternal food memories. Lin and Khoo depict food as comforting and possessing a unique ability to stimulate long-term memory to counter the short-term memory loss symptomatic of this form of dementia. The gustatory and the olfactory act directly upon the limbic brain, which houses emotions. In depicting Alzheimer's sufferers and their responses to food, 27°C and Recipe fight for causes. Lin calls attention to the marginalized in his portrayal of the mother succumbing to the disease from the perspective of her son—a character based on contemporary Taiwanese baker Wu Pao-chun, who overcame the adversity of impoverishment to win the world famous Master's de la Boulangerie and found prestigious eponymous bakeries. Parallel to its role in individual memory, food preserves cultural memory. Analogous to culinary arts, cinema, which is made for consumption, combines art and science, embodies culture, and incorporates tradition and innovation, as I show in this comparative study.

Carlos Poveda's Domestic Landscapes are linked to a history of food and art that reaches back to Greco-Roman antiquity and becomes empowered with contemporary artists who sculpt or paint their works in edible materials to be devoured by spectators. Poveda's Landscapes, however, offer food that is symbolic——inedible. He reinvents the organic by using industrial refuse that he converts, colors, and models in a cauldron in a process as akin to alchemy as to cooking. His is not a faithful transcription of meals in the style of classical still lifes, but rather an artistic overlapping of emotions, that surround the idea of the edible. Looking at his sculptures we may feel revulsion, but what sickens us is not so much his creation as the awareness it brings of our intrinsically predatory nature. He gives us an art form that not only fails to provoke appetite but also touches our deepest culinary memories and leads us back to a primal past by asserting the significance of food in our collective memory. Ultimately, our strongest reaction to his work may be the fear that we won't be able to digest the absurdity of our daily life.