Just in Time for Thanksgiving, 5 Family-Friendly Films about Food, Best TV Shows to Binge Watch

Ah, Thanksgiving. A time when we come together to give thanks for our many blessings, eat, spend time with our loved ones, eat, watch football, eat …

You get the idea. Thanksgiving is about a lot of stuff—but stuffing (and the rest of the food on your holiday table) takes center stage.

And really, it makes sense. For thousands of years, we’ve been conditioned to associate food with family, with community, with celebration. Food isn’t just the fuel to keep us ambulatory: It brings us together.

Let’s take a look at some films, ranging from eight-minute shorts to full-length movies, that really help illustrate the power of food to draw us close to one another. Most are navigable for families. And we’ll begin with …

Babette’s Feast (1987, G)

For years, Babette Hersant has cooked and cleaned for a pair of elderly sisters leading a small, aging and fractured religious congregation. But in the time before the mysterious woman appeared on the sisters’ doorstep, she had bought a lottery ticket. And now—ages later—she discovers that she’s won a windfall of 10,000 francs. She uses that money to cook a feast for the sisters and the congregation. The sisters, fearing that the feast might be too sensuous to be quite proper for Christians to eat, forbids most of the guests from speaking about the quality of the feast. But the meal doesn’t go quite as the sisters planned—much to their benefit.

OK, so admittedly, Babette’s Feast—despite its G rating—is a hard sell for most families. It’s Danish, for one thing, and for a lot of kids it’ll be a bit of a snoozer. But it is an excellent film. And for adults and (perhaps) for teens, this film digs deeply into themes of love and sacrifice. Because while the meal might’ve been decadent, the ability of that food to bring people together was—the movie suggests—nothing short of divine.

Bao (2018, G)

This Pixar short—released with Incredibles 2—introduces us to a sentient Chinese dumpling, or bao, doted on by her mother/creator. The mother loves Bao very much—and she’s determined to make sure that no harm comes her little doughy boy’s way. Alas, her overprotection leads to friction and, ultimately, disaster. It was all a dream—but a dream that reflects the real-world strain between mother and son. But when the son offers his mother a confection that he himself had angrily refused ages before, the two realize how much they love one another. 

Food can be a potent symbol of love and care: Many of us—especially when we’re parents or grandparents—show our love through food. This eight-minute masterpiece nods to that. But there’s far more going on here than just animated foodstuffs. It drills into the joys, the sorrows and the fears of being a mom.

A family of Indian immigrants breaks down in the French countryside, and the family’s eccentric patriarch decides to open a boisterous restaurant right there. The catch: The restaurant is located right across the street from a posh French eatery led by the snooty, irascible Madame Mallory. She doesn’t take kindly to these upstarts taking her customers and sullying her cultivated corner of France. But then she meets Hassan, the Indian family’s gifted son. And, slowly, everything changes.

This film is about food: Hassan, heir to his own family’s rich Indian culinary traditions, wants to expand his own cooking palate. But as he begins to learn how to cook French food—then fuse Indian and French cooking together—that food becomes a metaphor for cross-cultural understanding, respect and, ultimately, love. Few films show how food can bring people together more effectively.

Remy loves to cook. But alas, he’s a rat, and rat chefs rarely climb to the top of Paris’ cut-throat foodie scene. But then, he crosses paths with Linguini, a young, clumsy kitchen boy. The two create a curious partnership and soon, together, they turn the food world on its ear.

We’ve talked about how food can bring us together. And that’s literally true in the case of Ratatouille. Without Remy and Linguini’s shared interest in food, they never would’ve become very unusual friends. But Remy’s cooking brings together others, too—bringing about reconciliation, newfound respect and, for one grouchy food critic, a beautiful reminiscence of his own childhood. This film—made during Pixar’s golden age, sinks far deeper than your typical Parisian glaze.

Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out (1989, NR)

Wallace loves cheese. I mean, he loves cheese. And when he and his ever-so-wise dog, Gromit, run out of the stuff, they decide to build a rocket and fly to the moon. Because, of course, the moon is made of cheese.

Sure, it seems like a lot of work, given they could probably just go to the supermarket. But this rocket became the catalyst to launch the stop-motion career of Nick Park—creator of the Shaun the Sheep franchise, the Chicken Run movies and, of course, Wallace and Gromit. And while this silly story admittedly doesn’t have a lot of narrative heft—it’s certainly no Babette’s Feast—it’s a delightful, literally cheesy comedic romp to the moon.

Here’s a little clip, just for your, um, eat-ification.

Happy Thanksgiving!