Here’s a likely familiar scene: you’re curled up on your couch, a screen playing Netflix a few inches away from your face, with a plate of food you’re shovelling into your mouth with alarming speed. While you might be enjoying the movie, somewhere in the back of your mind you understand that food is making the experience significantly better. This relationship between film and food was put under the microscope last Monday for writer David Sax’s oddball event, A Cure for the Munchies.
According to Sax, a stoner-film aficionado, what we eat while watching a film is critical to our movie-watching experience. For Sax, movies and munchies go hand-in-hand. So, to join him on stage for the discussion, Sax brought along Cory Mintz, a food critic for the Toronto Star; Aja Sax, a well-known Toronto bartender; and Anthony Rose, the head chef at the popular Rose & Sons diner. As the three rambled happily about their different experiences as burnouts in high school, Sax presented them a weighty question: “What would be the experience you’ve had with movies and munchies that changed your life?”
The chattering crowd died down to give the panelists on stage their undivided attention. A series of stories unfolded: Rose told of his experience watching Papillon while high with his father, which segued into Mintz’s life-changing moment watching a marathon of Kung Fu movies while eating a tray of baked potatoes and maple syrup. At one point, even a member of the audience joined in the conversation to endorse watching The Last Waltz while eating a pie. Finally, in order to give the audience a similar experience, the talk moved on to its main event, a showing of the quintessential stoner movie: Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. To round out the night, the audience members were each given a medium-sized popcorn to munch on, with the promise of burgers cooked by Rose once the movie had finished. The already-inebriated crowd was, needless to say, more than pleased.
As many already know, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a movie about two stoner friends who go on a lengthy and hilarious journey to find a particular fast food chain in New York, where they will be greeted with the finest of hamburgers. Much like Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (and probably intentionally so), A Cure for the Munchies was also an extensive journey in the pursuit of hamburgers. Not that the journey wasn’t a blast, because it totally was, but the hamburgers at the end of the show, which were as nicely fried as the people who ate them, were undeniably what we had all been waiting for. Greasy burger in mouth and drink in hand, it was clear that Sax was right: food and movies are a match made in heaven.
