The chocolate cake featured in the 1996 film Matilda is the canonical chocolate cake for all 90's kids.
Can anyone think of similarly generation-defining food items in media?
As another 90s kid, definitely pizza.
Ooh, for sure. We also had Pizza Hut back when it was a sit down place with a good deal on the all you can eat lunch buffet.
Da! Da dada da da da! Da dadada da da! Dee dottidee dottidee doh!
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had several extremely memorable moments. The greasy lipped german dude eating the microphone. Wonka taking a crunchy bite out of an obviously wax buttercup. Cabbage and laundry soup (maybe I just combined those in my developing brain). Scooping whipped cream and jelly with your hands from giant mushrooms. Biting a giant gummy worm in the middle. Charlie scarfing down a scrumdiddlyumptious bar fast enough to choke. Burping up fizzy lifting drink. Few movies had as many memorable food moments.
That candy room was apparently disgusting, for what it’s worth. The chocolate river quickly became the dumping ground for the cast and crew’s ashtrays, and it also started to smell like rotted food. Also, the river was extremely shallow, with only a small hidden cutout for Augustus to fall in and splash around.
Not sure if it counts but Harold and Kumar made me believe that White Castle burgers are better than they really are.
I feel like the unsaid joke of that movie was that going to White Castle is such a weird desire that you'd have to be high.
White Castle was — until that movie — largely unknown in many areas of the U.S. So yes, until the scene in which they finally reach White Castle, I held out hope that it would indeed be worth the trip.
The fact that it was, well, just a White Castle made it wholly relatable to anyone who ever had those late-night cravings, though.
For sure it counts
I don't have to say the name
Perhaps you should, because I have no idea what I'm looking at
The ruinous Turkish Delight from Narnia
Turkish delight i think? à la Narnia
Turkish Delight, from Narnia. It isn’t even that good, but the little brat was willing to sell out his entire family for it. Given, he was growing up under sugar rationing, and the turkish delight was magically enchanted. But still…
Saaaame
I remember desperately wanting to eat the Never food from Hook and the smorgasbord that Casper serves to his uncle's in the live action Casper, even after watching it be digested and ejected onto the floor 🤣
More of a general thing, but spinach was popularized as healthy food by Popeye.
American style hot dog, baseball, and the 1950s.
Green eggs and ham
The popsicle.
When I was a kid, so many parodies and comedies had ladies jumping out of giant cakes, I really though that was going to be a thing when I grew up. It was like the opposite of quicksand.
Pop out cakes. They were already going out of fashion in the XIXth century when it became even more misogynist with its association with showgirls and strippers. I think the 50s was the last time it was actually done unironically.
wow, can't believe i don't see the feast from the movie Hook!
first thing that came to my mind!
Holy shit I totally forgot about that! Definitely belongs here
The 2030s will be MREs
This comment brought to you by Factor
Surge!
Ooh, classic
The cake (that may or may not, in fact, be a lie) from Portal became the new hotness for a while.
The pizza they ate in "a goofy movie"
It was just. So. Gooey
YOU CAN DO IT, BRUCEY!
Cream buns from Van Wilder
Rick’s obsession with McDonald’s’ Mulan-promotional szechuan sauce wasn’t really generation-defining, but it definitely was one of the bigger moments where internet nerds crawled out of their caves and into the social spotlight for a hot minute. Still can’t believe people got violently enraged over that
Even though it didn't come out until the later part of the 2000s, the Portal cake is probably the official cake of that decade.
Better yet, it's based on a real black forest cake from a bakery near Valve
Would that mean that the cake is not, in fact, a lie?
Or is it a deeper commentary on the realism of a representation of a thing, a la Magritte's The Treachery of Images? The cake is a lie because it's not a cake, it's a representation of a cake.
Doc, this is heavy.
I loveeeee a good black forest cake.
Agreed. The cake is a lie.
I was watching the screensaver of a Big Buck Hunter arcade cabinet at the bar last night, and one of the minigames involved shooting roaches crawling all over a house. The cake in the kitchen was definitely the Portal cake.