Smut That Doesn't Suck: Food Wars!

You know, there can be more to smut than mere T&A.  Yes, sexually-charged content is often the meat and potatoes of any given ecchi series, but there are many manga that take an equally fervent and sensuous approach to other subjects.  For example, there's “food porn.”  It’s a term that’s traditionally used to describe a work where the act of cooking or consumption is framed and described in the same manner of pornography.  Every dish is laid out in the most decadent, lavish way possible.  The characters describe the dishes in the most detailed, sensual terms, as if every bite was inducing the most exquisite orgasms known to man.  So it’s not unreasonable for someone to combine food and sex and market that to a larger manga-reading public, although in practice it’s generally done with an older audience in mind.  What is novel is taking that combination and framing it within a battle tournament series, but leave it to the folks at Weekly Shonen Jump to turn just such an idea into a success.  That’s how we ended up with Yuto Tsukuda and Shun Saeki’s breakout manga Food Wars (Shokugeki no Soma).

Soma Yukihara is your standard scrappy underdog shonen protagonist.  His father runs a family-style restaurant in a neighbor that’s just as poor and scrappy as Soma himself.  In fact, it’s so poor and scrappy that Soma’s first challenge is to save the restaurant from an evil yuppie businesswoman who wants to buy out the restaurant to develop it.  He wins, but the victory is short-lived as Soma’s father soon shuts down the restaurant while he does a bit of world travelling.  In the mean time, he’s enrolled Soma in the prestigious Totsuki Soryo Culinary Institute.  The institute is lorded over by your standard overly-powerful student council, which in turn is dominated by the chairman’s granddaughter Erina.  She was born with the taste equivalent of perfect pitch, and anyone who doesn’t meet her high and haughty standards is expelled with extreme prejudice.  Soma meets her challenge and passes, but this not only earns her wrath but makes Soma the target of every other student with a burning need to prove themselves.  Armed only with his skills and the support of an equally rag-tag bunch of friends and enemies-turned-allies, Soma is determined to not only prove himself superior to Erina and her kind, but to prove himself to his father.

It’s that premise which has carried this series for over 150 chapters, and upon reading it’s easy to see how this series became a hit.  Neither the characters nor the plot are very deep – in fact, it’s basically the set-up for every coming-of-age kids’ movie and/or shonen manga ever, just with food.  Yet Tsukuda imbues every single one of them with a certain degree of sincerity.  Every character’s feelings are huge and sincere, and by god he is going to make sure that you feel them!  He also clearly savors coming up with new and more vivid ways to describe each dish and ingredient, which helps give every character’s raptures their own unique flavor.  He even carries over the poor vs. rich rivalry into the choices of ingredients and dishes that Soma and his opponents use.  Many of Soma’s opponents are overly confident that their refined, mostly European styles of cooking and high-class ingredients will win them the day.  Yet Soma wins every time with his twists on working-class versions of Japanese rice dishes and fried foods.  His poverty will always give him the edge because he has experience with making the most of limited resources and his time behind the counter has given him the ability to adapt and think on his feet.   It’s a dynamic that resonates just as much with Western audiences as it does with Japanese ones, and it’s hard to not root for Soma to hoist these snobs by their own petards.  As someone with some experience with cooking, I can also appreciate the genuine cleverness of the twists Soma applies to his dishes.  Best of all, the manga encourages you to try them for yourself by putting the recipes for them in between the chapters.

I also have to give credit to Saeki’s art.  It’s lively and packed with action, and thus every cook-off looks as spirited and intense as any epic fist fight.  The characters are all distinct, cute, and anime-friendly in style.  He uses lots of dynamic angles, lighting and framing to sell the drama of each encounter.  Still, none of that can compare to the way he frames the food.  Every dish is drawn in near photo-realistic detail, and it's framed with all the heady reverence of a cover spread for Bon Appetit, and such imagery more than qualifies this manga as food porn.  That being said, the only thing he draws with more reverence is the way he draws the female cast.  He uses a LOT of fanservice, usually so he can visualize just how good and rapturous Soma’s dishes truly are to those partaking in them.  Women pant, fall to their knees, and frequently engage in bizarre and weirdly sensual fantasy sequences to illustrate the sensations that Soma’s meals create.  Saeki is clearly pandering to the older segment of Shonen Jump’s fanbase with this choice, and he's also clearly pushing the edges of what their editors will allow.  Fanservice is nothing new to Shonen Jump, but rarely did it extend beyond "tee hee, panties!" until more recent series like Food Wars. While some of his images are in questionable taste, they do generally fit well with the over-the-top tone of the story.  The imagery is so ludicrous that it almost becomes funny after a while, and it helps that these moments get spread out a lot more as the plot proper begins.  Still, I do wish he had been a bit more even-handed on the fanservice front.  Yeah, there is some man-flesh on display, but it's more often treated as a joke than as something for the ladies to enjoy and it's more than clear where Saeki's priorities are located. 

Smut can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and sometimes it can be just as much about satisfying basic needs like hunger as it is about satisfying one’s lust.  Food Wars shows how you can combine those two desires and make them thrive in the relatively chaste world of shonen without sacrificing quality.  Food Wars isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s fun to read and compelling as any good shonen manga should be.  It even manages to combine its own particular flavor of fanservice with a lot of familiar shonen staples to create an experience that’s just as unique as any of Soma’s dishes.  It’s honestly one of the better series currently running in Shonen Jump and those looking for good, cheeky shonen or a saucier take on food manga would do well to give it a try.