Why the Food Acting on 'Gilmore Girls' Upsets Me

As I begin to write this essay, I'm watching Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) take the tiniest bite of a hamburger I've ever seen a person take. Oddly, she's chewing like that bite contains more than a crumb of bun, and I feel myself cringing as I sit here trying to find the words to convey what about this makes me so angry.

This particular scene is from the season 2 episode "Presenting Lorelai Gilmore," where Rory is pressured by her well-to-do grandmother, Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), to be presented to society at a coming-out ball. At the end of Rory's evening playing debutante, she and her mom Lorelai (Lauren Graham) wind up at Luke's Diner for burgers.

"After all you've been through tonight, and I come in here to find you eating like that?" Lorelai quips as Rory is about to bite into a burger. In response, Rory lifts her right pinky finger in the air. "There you go," Lorelai replies. "Being a lady is hard," Rory jokes, before taking what, I guess, could be described as a ladylike bite. This scene goes on for about 5 minutes, and no further bites of the burger are taken; it remains whole.

If it's not already obvious, I've watched the TV show Gilmore Girls a lot, especially the first 3 seasons that capture Rory's high school years at Chilton. I'm not really sure what makes the show binge-able: maybe it's all the references to books, music, movies, and, yes, food. I don't remember watching it religiously during my early-Aughties adolescence, but it was one of the first series I decided to revisit when I signed up for Netflix a few years ago. Now, it's what I turn on when there's nothing else to watch, when I just need some noise in the background.

But I wouldn't say that I like Gilmore Girls. I'm not exactly hate watching the series, either. It's something in between. I'm trying to make sense of the series, to come up with theories that would explain plot holes or character flaws or how much I seem to hate Rory Gilmore. One theory I've been playing around with is that Gilmore Girls is actually a sci-fi show, and Stars Hollow is a place where there's this weird structure of time and everyone speaks in obscure pop culture references.

Mostly, I find myself watching the series through the lens of the food that Lorelai and Rory (and sometimes other characters) consume. Two central character traits of the Gilmore girls are that they eat only junk food and never exercise. It's part of what makes them special (or alien if we go with my sci-fi theory), what sets them apart from other women, which seems to be a recurring theme of the show.

I get it, Amy Sherman-Palladino. You wanted to show on camera that women can eat, that they don't have to be obsessed with fitness and wellness. But I take issue with the mean-spirited way you convey this.

Sherman-Palladino essentially introduced the "cool girl" archetype with Lorelai and Rory Gilmore: two women who could eat as much as, if not more than, men and still look hot without doing any form of exercise. And the show spends a lot of time looking down on women who are mindful of what they eat or spend time working out. I'm thinking specifically about Lorelai's disdain for Christopher's (Rory's dad) slim girlfriend, Sherry, in season 3. Or how in season 4 Rory can sum up what she thinks of her new Yale roommate, Janet, in 2 words: "She jogs."

This is what upsets me most about the small bites of burgers, the food left behind on plates, the tiny morsels of a meal picked up with a fork or spoon. The over-the-top chewing might actually piss me off most. If you're going to make your characters eat a lot, then please show them actually enjoying food.

A few scenes of note:

• Pilot: Lorelai and Rory are at Luke's, and they get in a huge fight when Rory says she doesn't want to leave Stars Hollow High to go to Chilton. They storm out of Luke's, plates of burgers and fries untouched.
• S1, "The Damn Donna Reed Show": Dean (Jared Padalecki) enters the Gilmore house bearing pizza. In the living room, he finds Lorelai and Rory mocking The Donna Reed Show. Throughout this scene where Rory learns that her boyfriend might hold some sexist views, Rory and Lorelai are awkwardly holding the same small slices of pizza, clearly having taken only one bite before the theme song cuts in.
• S2, "The Road to Harvard": Lorelai and Rory's impromptu road trip—embarked upon when Lorelai decides she doesn't want to marry Max Medina (Scott Cohen) after all—lands them at a B&B not far from Boston. The Chesire Cat is pretty much their worst nightmare, and they go to bed without eating to avoid mingling with the other guests. The next morning, they sneak downstairs when they think there's a window to get passed the guests, only to be spotted and pulled into a conversation. Rory and Lorelai "scarf" down fresh-made scones, over-the-top chewing ensues.
• S2, "Teach Me Tonight": Rory and Lorelai are finishing up dinner at Luke's. Rory takes a bite of something the size of a pea (probably wasn't a pea since the Gilmore girls avoid vegetables at all costs) and chews it like a piece of tough steak. She continues to chew this morsel of food for the duration of this scene, where Kirk (Sean Gunn) is talking to Lorelai about previewing his short film at the town's Movies on the Square Night.
• S3, "Swan Song": Episode ends with an awkward mother-daughter conversation: Rory's contemplating losing her virginity to Jess (Milo Ventimiglia). They sit silently eating from the styrofoam containers they picked up from Al's Pancake World. They appear to be eating (and chewing!) rice grain by grain.

I need to take a step back to talk about food acting, which refers to the way actors eat food as their onscreen characters. Sometimes the eating is central to a scene, like if the characters are at a dinner party (think the Gilmore Friday night dinners). Sometimes the eating just gives a character something to do in a scene. Either way, there's something about eating on screen that makes characters more relatable to viewers. "Whether it's a fantasy or a mob movie, a romance or a heist, eating makes a character seem like a real human being," writes Melissa Buote in a 2018 Eater article that praises how the film Ocean's 8 depicts women eating.

This, of course, isn't a conscious thing. We don't actually think, "Oh, Sandra Bullock's character is enjoying 3 plates of food at Veselka's in the Village. Now I know she's human." But it is a moment that makes Debbie Ocean feel a little less like a character and more like flesh and blood.

Bullock is masterful at eating in character. I think back to a scene in Miss Congeniality where FBI agent Gracie Hart is getting to know Victor Melling (Michael Caine), a trainer for Miss United States contestants, over dinner at a fancy restaurant. On Gracie's plate is a mess of steak and spaghetti with tomato sauce. She cuts a piece of meat that's slightly too big for her mouth, swishes it around in sauce, and proceeds to have a conversation with Victor as she chomps on the "half-masticated cow" (Victor's words). The way Bullock devours that steak aligns with Gracie's unpolished and unmannered personality.

Brad Pitt is often hailed as the definitive food actor. On YouTube you can find mash-ups of all his best food-eating scenes. There's even a cookbook of all the onscreen meals Pitt has consumed. "He's the Laurence Olivier of eating," Caroline Liem, a casting director and professor at Pace Performing Arts, told Emily Heil at the Seattle Times back in 2019. Like Bullock, Pitt knows how to use eating to emphasize a character trait, to make a character he's playing feel more like a regular ol' human.

From Pop-Tarts to Red Vines, fans of Gilmore Girls have a similar cult obsession with all the food that's consumed on the show. There's a cookbook and a food diary for every episode. One woman actually ate like a Gilmore for a week and lived to tell the tale. But there's a slight, if philosophical, difference between cataloguing all of Brad Pitt's food acting moments and simply logging all the food that appears on Gilmore Girls. The TV show might be obsessed with food, but its focus is not on eating. It alludes to eating, but all the fast-paced food shoveling that Rory and Lorelai supposedly do happens off camera like the action in a Greek drama.

In the season 1 episode "Kiss and Tell," there's a great scene where a pizza is masterfully used to indicate both the passage of time and that these Gilmore girls sure can eat. We don't see Lorelai, Rory, or Dean (who Lorelai invited over for a Willy Wonka movie night) take more than a bite of the pizza, but the point is not that we see them eat the pizza. The point is that we know that they have eaten it.

When there are only a few slices left, Lorelai asks no on in particular, "Who wants more?" "I do," Rory replies, going in for another slice. "Wow, you can eat," Dean says. "Yes I can. Oh, that's bad, isn't it?" "No, most girls don't eat. It's good that you eat," Dean reassures Rory.

When we do see Lorelai and Rory eat, it feels out of character and unrealistic. I've never seen them relish their food or eat like they have any kind of appetite. Why wouldn't Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel develop a more Gilmore style of eating for their characters?

In a cast reunion interview, Graham and Bledel admitted that they actually ate the food. "It really bothers me when actors don't eat the food that's in a scene. Like they're supposed to be having a meal but don't eat it so we would go for it most of the time," Bledel said. Because they would have to do several takes of a scene where they were eating Cheetos or pizza or Chinese, they kept spit buckets nearby so they wouldn't eat too much and get sick.

The small bites Graham and Bledel take on camera reveal to the audience that, as actors, they're dealing with multiple takes. That's what makes food acting difficult. That and the fact that an actor isn't eating as themself, but as the character they're playing. You could argue that Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel missed an opportunity to develop their characters through eating in ways that a script might not have even called for. According to Caroline Liem, what makes Brad Pitt's food acting so good is that "he's just one with food."

I'll admit that this essay isn't really about the food acting on Gilmore Girls, but my own anxieties and insecurities around food and my body. I've struggled with an eating disorder for years, which makes me hyperaware of food on TV, food in movies, food in books. It also makes me hyperaware of other women's bodies and how my own compares.

When I'm watching Gilmore Girls, I can't help but focus on the weird signals the show seems to be sending about food. I'm supposed to believe that Rory and Lorelai eat anything they want and stay thin, yet the food acting on the show indicates a kind of discomfort. It also reveals a truth: No one can really eat like a Gilmore girl without consequence, be it indigestion or weight gain.

What's upsetting is that even on a show that introduced us to 2 smart, independent, and witty (albeit self-centered, immature, and unkind) women, we still don't get to see them really enjoy food. We don't see the Gilmore girls sopping up gravy from a plate, talking incoherently with their mouths full. We never actually get to see the extent of the Gilmore appetite.