Beef created by Lee Sung Jin, The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.
Who gets a seat at the table? Food and status in Beef and the art of Judy Chicago.
Written by Francesca Tiana
If you could choose 6 people, living or dead, to invite to a dinner party, who would they be? Sharing a meal with someone is often considered an honour and a privilege: kings of the past were celebrated with banquets and Jesus broke bread and drank wine with his disciples. We dine hypothetically with famous and infamous characters of human past or present. The association between food and status is ancient and complex. With the cost of living rising in some of the wealthiest countries in the world, we are still reckoning with it today. Food is not only a symbol of wealth or status: it is the unlikely intersection between the extremely rich and the extremely poor. The former pursues food as a symbol of wealth, worldliness, good taste and good company. For the latter, food can be a necessity for survival or a luxury that is in short supply, but also a source of pride, community and an important part of cultural identity.
This disturbing intersection is explored in Netflix and A24’s Beef, directed by Jake Schreier and created by Lee Sung Jin. Sung Jin’s repertoire includes Hulu’s comedy Dave and Beef puts a dark spin on the comedy format: the events of the show unfold from a particularly aggressive incident of road rage. During a key scene, Beef visually references Judy Chicago’s 1979 installation The Dinner Party. Chicago is known for her feminist works which re-examine the place of women in society’s history, but in the context of Beef, The Dinner Party gives new significance to who is and isn’t present at the dining table. Together, they prompt a consideration of food as decadence or necessity.
The title of the show, Beef, in this context used as slang for an argument, calls to mind meat and flesh and is a pithy reminder that, just as beef means both food and dispute, food is both a physical necessity and symbolically pertinent in the show and in the world outside out of it. Indeed, food and its implements are elevated to dramatic status in Beef. The protagonist, Danny, played with fervency and angsty frustration by Steven Yeun, sizzles strips of pink beef on a hibachi grill that was the unlikely tool for his earlier suicide attempt. Later, rice cookers are used to store illegally obtained cash.
Food is used as a marker of a gaudy excess and a signifier of financial struggle. In the first episode of Beef, Danny’s house is full of takeaway packaging, a signifier of his lack of time and energy to luxuriate in eating in the ways Ali Wong’s character Amy and her friends do. Talking to his father on the phone, Danny’s father says he is so busy working that he doesn’t have time to eat breakfast. Success and financial stability can sometimes be measured through having time to sit through ameal: a simple luxury of comfortable everyday life. Danny, inundated with piles of oily styrofoam containers, prioritises convenience over pleasure because his life is circumscribed by financial difficulty.
Where food is fuel for Danny, for his antagonist, Amy, it is a pastime, if a reluctant one. Amy goes to a pretentious dinner party with her husband George, hosted by wealthy business owner Jordan Forster. The table is a cement triangle, casting a dramatic silhouette in an atmospherically lit room, a neat visual reference to Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Chicago’s installation gives women who have been neglected by canon and history their own celebration, raising them to the status and opportunity of the male academics Chicago observed dominating conversation at mealtimes in her own life. Sacajawea and Virginia Woolf, among others, are each given a place setting, complete with a plate that contains a representation of their genitalia. Chicago’s unconventional choice of table shape affords each guest a higher status than if they had been placed around a democratically shaped circle: there is an assertiveness to a triangular formation which also creates tension. The shape implies a certain hierarchy within its form.
This visual reference gives new meaning to the dinner party that Amy and her husband attend. Even among those privileged enough to be present, there is a hierarchy. The wealthy host, Jordan, to whom Amy is trying to sell her business, stands at the apex, her silhouette echoed by a gold harp behind her and a bouquet of mossy green and rust brown fungi on the table in front of her.The organised opulence and reverential approach to the dining experience satirises how the rich and privileged treat food. With food insecurity and how this highlights class divides being a topical concern, films such as The Menu, released in 2022, also explore this concept, taking this satire of the restaurant industry and its affected clientele to its logical extreme: the dinner guests become part of the menu themselves – literally. Netflix’s 2020 film The Platform, uses a platform which delivers food to the floors of a vertical prison, those at the top getting their fill whilst those at the bottom starve on the scraps of the others, as an allegory for capitalism.
The status implied by the borrowing of Chicago’s triangular table is consequential in Beef beyond deciding who sits at the head of the table. Jordan Foster, one of the few white characters, the majority being Asian American, is the host of the dinner party in Beef and has all the cultural sensitivity of a fork at a Japanese restaurant. Jordan owns a ludicrous collection of ancient crowns from other nations and frequently makes micro-aggressive remarks: “You have this serene Zen buddhist thing going on,” Jordan says to Amy. Sung Jin’s witty direction then has the camera pan to a statue of a buddha head metres away. In Beef, those at the head of the table are the least deserving of their position. Chicago’s The Dinner Party unwittingly creates a hierarchy by omission: the work has been criticised for failing to include Spanish and Latin American women deserving of a seat at the table.
The scene then cuts to Danny, who is shown working his way through a bag of Burger King chicken sandwiches. He is attending a dinner party of his own, but his table is the hood of his truck and his cutlery is his fingers. In the words of his brother, Danny “regularly drives to what he thinks is the best Burger King, just to eat four original chicken sandwiches alone”. Danny’s comedically absurd Burger King elitism is described with disdain and pity by his brother, but the approach of Jordan and her guests to food is just as absurd, if not more so by contrast to Danny’s ritual of sustenance.
In the words of Amy on seeing the dishes at the dinner party, an arrangement of mushroom, egg and vegetable with a flimsy blob of foam suspended above it, “they’re normal mushrooms, this is so stupid.” Both Danny and Amy are eating in a manner which is excessive, but at opposite extremes.The dining table of Beef and that of The Dinner Party are equally uncanny. The overall effect of the size, shape and atmosphere is to make eating a meal, a familiar and comforting concept, alien to the audience in much the same way that hibachi grills and rice cookers are used for so much more than their intended purpose. Similarly, the chalices, a reference to the symbolic use of chalices in
Christianity, and silverware that Chicago uses as part of her installation will not be used for their intended purpose: there is no food or drink in sight.
This discomfiting use of the uncanny is a trademark of A24 productions and an important reminder that the fact that Beef can use Chicago’s metaphor for status almost 45 years later to equal effect should unsettle us. Food and class inequality should not still be a modern problem. Beef and The Dinner Party present a clever commentary in their satire of the traditions of dining: those present at the dinner party can not only enjoy the food but can participate in the conversation, a nod to the many and vast advantages of wealth and social standing. Food shouldn’t be an indicator of wealth and wealth shouldn’t be a signifier of social status.
Today, the number of people suffering from food insecurity is double what it was in 2020. People eating like kings while some don’t at all should be a problem that exists only in the historical traditions these works reference, not in the 1970s when Chicago created The Dinner Party and certainly not today. Nevertheless, Beefs’ meaty commentary still holds true: extreme wealth and extreme need still go hand in hand.
Beef is streaming now on Netflix.
