A Pre-Trash Dinner Party

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“This is shockingly delicious,”a pulmonologist friend and guest at a potluck dinner I hosted a few weeks ago said, as she lifted a third forkful to her mouth. “I’ve never seen anything like it. What is it?”

“Great question!” the comedy writer who’d brought the mystery entrée said. She poked at a striated, gray, pucklike object with a knife. “It looks like meat that archeologists discovered. It came from a food truck on Second Avenue, and it’s vegetarian.” Not much of a clue.

Eight friends and I had gathered that night to save the planet. We probably didn’t save it entirely, but there is a chance that we contributed infinitesimally less than we normally do toward the percentage of earth’s destruction that is caused by food waste. Everything on our dinner table had been obtained by my guests using apps that allow people to buy leftover food from markets, restaurants, bakeries, and other outlets at a discount—in other words, we mostly dined on pre-trash that would otherwise have been chucked.

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The criticJustin Changshares five moments when food steals the scene.

1. At the end of a long day, Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames), the gruff paterfamilias in Vincente Minnelli’s glorious 1944 musical“Meet Me in St.\xa0Louis,”just wants to savor a leisurely dinner at home with his family. He doesn’t understand, then, why the soup is whisked so hurriedly from the table, or why the corned beef has been shaved rather than sliced. There is a reason for the rushed service and meagre portions, but it hardly matters. Anyone who’s ever been hangry will feel a stomach growl of sympathy.

2. Too rarely does one see characters eat in a movie—and I mean really eat. But, in“McCabe & Mrs. Miller”(1971), the brothel madam, Constance Miller (Julie Christie), is a fantastic exception: after a long journey, she orders a hearty repast of four fried eggs, stew, and some strong tea. As she gorges herself, using a piece of bread to mop everything up, her future business partner, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), looks on transfixed, amused—and already hopelessly smitten.

3. One of the most realistic, free-flowing, and mountingly tense of all meal sequences can be found in John Cassavetes’s“A Woman Under the Influence”(1974). After a long night of work, Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk), a construction foreman, and his crew members sit down for a spaghetti breakfast prepared by Nick’s wife, Mabel (Gena Rowlands). What begins warm and convivial, with sloshed red wine and pasta-twirling lessons, becomes disquieting as Mabel fidgets, flirts, and ratchets up the anxiety—hers, yours, everyone’s.

4. Wong Kar-wai’s sublime“In the Mood for Love”(2000) was conceived under the working title “A Story About Food.” In one of several scenes filmed in Hong Kong’s since-shuttered Goldfinch restaurant, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) share a dinner that they imagine their unfaithful spouses might have enjoyed together. As Nat King Cole croons and utensils scrape against dishes, the line between role play and romance begins to blur.

5. A late-night snack leads to marital salvation in the exquisite climax of Yasujirō Ozu’s“The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice”(1952). After a business trip is unexpectedly postponed, Mokichi Satake (Shin Saburi) returns home and spends a rare evening with his estranged wife, Taeko (Michiyo Kogure). Feeling peckish, the couple scrounge together a simple but delicious meal ofochazuke, or tea over rice, with pickled vegetables. What follows is a reconciliation of aching delicacy, a testament to the power of love and leftovers.

P.S. Sundays in Lyoninclude fresh baguettes, available at the bakery from three in the morning onward. Before attending L’Institut Paul Bocuse, Bill Buford lived by the River Saône with his wife and twin three-year-old boys, and learned to make bread from Bob the baker. “Everyone left with an armful and with the same look, suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied,”Buford writesin this enchanting recollection. “It was a lesson in the appeal of good bread—handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air.”