Food Wars: An Attempt At Realism That Failed

Despite having a grounded premise, the show about cooking battles leans heavily into fantasy

Source: meganime.com

I’ve avoided watching Food Wars! (or Shokugeki no Soma) for years now. Something about it just did not speak to me when it first aired in 2015. I guess it’s because it was a show about chefs trying to make cooking more exciting than it actually was. I mean, a Shonen for cooking? How absurd is that concept?

But a few weeks ago, I sat down and finally watched the first season, mainly because it was conveniently on Netflix. I then watched the remaining three seasons and read the rest of the manga (the fifth season is on hiatus at the moment). You might be asking yourself why a video on Food Wars! would be on a channel about Fantasy. Well, I’m going to sit here and argue for why that is.

A quick rundown on the plot before I get to the meat and potatoes of this video. Our protagonist is Soma Yukihira, a young man working at the Yukihira Diner. He goes off to attend Totsuki Culinary Academy, to become a chef good enough to defeat his father who is also a chef. The series focuses on various iterations of a Food War, where two students within the school cook different meals for judges in front of an audience. There are usually no restrictions (only culinary themes) in how these are run. The best cook wins based on the votes of three judges.

Food Wars! Doesn’t Know What Bias Is

The problem I have with the set up of a Food War is in the restrictions. In trying to find the better cook between two candidates, there is a multitude of factors that can influence what dish a judge votes for. The first and foremost being bias. A judge who has a taste for carrots but not tomatoes would vote that a Pasta Primavera with olive oil is superior to a Spaghetti Marinara. The deciding factor isn’t the skill of the chef, but the preference of the judge. Ergo, if one contestant is lucky enough to make a dish that two of the three judges prefer, then they’d win.

However, Food Wars! ignores this element entirely, making each judge out to be someone that does not have preferences and bases their decisions on arbitrary elements because that’s the only real way one could realistically have a battle between two different dishes. Who cares about which of the dishes has more personality? Even that is subjective. It should be about the differences in the quality of the same dish.

In case this wasn’t obvious already, the methodology of finding a superior craftsman or product is the exact opposite in real life. We remove all extraneous factors because we want to be as sure as possible that the creator or the product functions as intended. We want to make a scientifically-backed statement.

Scientific studies are usually how this is carried out. It’s strange to refer to things that aren’t usually associated with science in this manner, but in the end, Food Wars! wants to make the statement that one chef is better than another. That’s not subjective.

I mentioned earlier about power creep as it applied to better and better chefs showing up throughout the series. This concept could also be implied as to how unbalanced the Food Wars become over time. In the second season, a character named Subaru Mimasaka appears. His specialty is called ‘perfect trace.’ He mimics his opponent by stalking them before their bout, getting to know their recipes, improving on the dish they’re going to make, and then defeating them in this manner.

A very underhanded tactic, and one that is not relevant to his skill as a chef. Hilariously though, the school accepts this tomfoolery despite being a school dedicated to improving cooking skill, and ‘objectively’ determining the best cooks among the students.

If you think that’s good, just wait it gets better. During the third season, a major shift in the governing body happens at Totsuki, and Erina’s father takes control of the school. Nakamura wants to streamline what happens at Totsuki, essentially saying “fun is bad” and becomes the main villain. This leads to a whole host of extracurricular activities being axed. In typical Shonen fashion, a decision coming down from the governing body (known as Central) can only be reversed by a Food War.

Well, that’s exactly what Soma does. Fighting back, he declares a Food War against the man in charge of destroying his dorm, Etsuya Eizan. A man with an even lower standard of ethics than Mimasaka, Eizan bribes the judges of each Food War so they’d vote in his favor every time. This leads to all of the Food War challenges to restore extracurriculars being dropped, but Soma is too stubborn to back down so the competition continued as scheduled.

He knows he’s supposed to have a 100% chance of losing but ends up winning regardless because his dish is SO good that even paid off judges can’t deny Soma’s cooking is superior to Eizan’s. This has to be the most glaring disregard of bias so far. Not only does it not take into account personal taste, but the judges have a monetary incentive. Just because a dish is good doesn’t mean they have to vote for it. There are no rules that make this a necessity.

I consider eating good food to be a reward in itself, so getting that and money? Easy choice. This has to be some of the most baffling writing I’ve witnessed in a long time. What’s the point here? It’s certainly not to create better chefs.

So, how do we fix this problem? Unfortunately, I don’t think we can without changing the target audience. Shonen is about action and keeping the viewer on their toes. This is why there’s always an extraneous factor every episode to spice things up, and why the show keeps introducing better and better chefs in the form of power creep. Every episode having a Food War, where the main character was to make the same dish as their opponent with the same tools and the same ingredients, would get old fast.

For reference, I’d also like to point out that cooking shows in the real world also fall into traps like these. They too exist to entertain the viewer and fairness involving judgments on dishes is thrown out the window in most cases. There are a few exceptions though, like how Gordon Ramsay’s Master Chief periodically has a Mystery Box challenge. Cooks are forced to use the same ingredients, being judged on their ability to make the dish taste good and look visually appealing. This eliminates a lot of the bias present in these shows. The flavors of the ingredients are the same, so skill is being measured.

It goes without saying that in my opinion, having a Shonen that relies on structured competition doesn’t work so well. It’s why most don’t take that route, upping the stakes with open-world threats, and the chance of death is very real. Imagine if every fight in Naruto had a teacher stepping in just like how Guy protected Lee from Gaara. There wouldn’t be any tension. Fair fights don’t keep people in their seats. They aren’t interesting.

We aren’t trying to ask a vague question like “is ____ stronger than _____.” The question is specific. Can “_____ cook better than ______.” It’s why Food Wars! has structured competition because a chef’s strength is not determined by who’s left standing, but by the opinions of their customers.

Stretching The Limits On What’s Possible

Whenever a character eats a dish they find delicious, their body goes through euphoria and quite literally breaks down as they consume it. It’s an allegory for orgasm, and it’s weird. I’d say this is probably for fanservice’s sake but really, a lot of the times the food’s description as it’s eaten is more akin to describing an event.

I think it’s important to distinguish between fantasy tropes, and what we refer to as ‘movie logic.’ Both of these aspects are often the same: an event occurs that is not possible and can be considered as magical or absurd. However, it is the intention behind the scene that distinguishes them. I’d say Food Wars! was written for the latter in mind, trying to make a Shonen out of cooking requires these kinds of elements. Yet when I watched, it was hard not to see the Fantasy elements involved.

It helps when superpowers are introduced. Soma ends up going against characters that have superhuman abilities, like Erina’s God Tongue. More or less an extremely refined sense of taste, she can detect a dish’s tiniest imperfections. Other characters have extremely potent sensory organs. Akira Hayama has a sense of smell that measures the quality of ingredients and can measure a dish’s progress while cooking. Ikumi Mito can tell the temperature of a dish by touching it with her lips.

The show tries to present these as skills one can learn, which is what leads me to the movie logic assumption, but we all know how incredibly false that is. A sense of smell that strong is in the biological integrity of the nose, and then to categorize all the different scents over time requires an incredible memory. Humans are not ordinarily built for such sensitivity, and that includes our lips and tongue.

Then the abilities get even weirder in the BLUE arc. Replacing Azami, his illegitimate son Asahi becomes the main antagonist. His ability is called Cross Knives, which lets him increase his cooking skill by using the tools of the opponents he defeats. He ‘absorbs the essence’ contained within them. The more he wins, the stronger he becomes.

Up until this point, you could argue for movie logic, but the final arc went full-on fantasy here. In fact, it’s often cited as where the story goes downhill in terms of quality by the fanbase. The conflict just becomes more absurd than what they signed up for, and that’s quite an accomplishment considering it’s a Shonen.

Random Thoughts

1. Aside from Isami, every single character in this series is at peak physical condition with little to no body fat. Look, I know that as a Shonen series (and an Ecchi one), Food Wars! would have characters that look like this. The problem is that most Shonen also have characters doing physical activity for 10 hours a day and its sort of justifiable to have that. But chefs? People who constantly eat the food they create for testing, opponent’s food just for research, or act as judges eating student’s food should not be this fit. During tournament arcs, the judges eat multiple meals per day. There’s also no indication that any of these calories are being worked off. I understand that I should be suspending my disbelief for eye candy. Believe me, I know it’s not that deep, but this specific scenario makes even less sense than usual.
2. What is it with Japanese media and student councils? The fact that Senzaimon was ousted as the director by the votes of students just does not make sense to me. Even funnier that Erina becomes director despite still being a student herself. How exactly does this work?
3. Just to be clear, I actually like this series, though I’d have to agree that it gets worse after Azami’s defeat. A lot of buildup does not get any payoff. Still, this show did hit a good number of emotional beats for me, and I had fun watching it. I am the type of person to pick apart the things I like just as equally as what I dislike. The only difference is what I’m willing to forgive. Good ‘ol subjectivity.

Conclusion

I don’t think saying “haha Food Wars! was Fantasy all along!” is a very meaningful statement to make. It’s easy to argue just because of the creative direction the series went in. But the statement “Food Wars! is the perfect example of realism in Shonen falling apart” is. When concerning the target demographic: battle themes, strong visuals, and the like; an ordinary foundation for the plot like cooking isn’t going to cut it. The power creep accelerated past what a normal cooking show could provide and introduced superhuman powers. Even magic. It also did not attempt to weigh any actual objectivity in making objective statements, because to do that would be boring to watch.

In the end, do we as the viewer care about who is the better chef? No. We want to see the main character progress in their struggle. We want to see conflict. We want to see them win. It boils down to why we don’t see Pikachu thunder bolting water types repeatedly. It’s not fun to watch, despite how smart the strategy is. Food Wars! is dumb, but it’s the kind of dumb I can forgive.

There definitely are Shonen that fall out of these tendencies, and even ones that lean more on realism, but (based on my own opinion here) perhaps they aren’t all that popular because those elements are conflicting with one another. All of the well-known Shonen have the same things in common. Fantasy simply brings out Shonen themes in the most effective manner.