Food Wars Volume 1 by Yuto Tsukudo and Shun Saeki
This is a potentially engaging battle style foodie manga that I found myself having a difficult time getting into due to the copious amounts of fan service. I do realize that in shonen manga, one has to expect some boobs and miniskirts, just as one might expect scenes of shirtless vampires chained to the wall in supernatural shoujo manga, but I thought the sexual elements in Food Wars didn’t really enhance what might otherwise be a fun food battle manga.
Soma has grown up cooking for his father’s neighborhood restaurant. He’s trying to battle his father for supremacy but still falling short of the mark. The third page of the manga contains a reference to tentacle rape, as Soma pops a bite of a squid food experiment into a girls mouth, only for her to feel horrifically molested by the terrible combination of flavors. The first chapter in the book is a prolog, as representatives of a hostile corporation try to move in on the restaurant, Soma’s father decides to take off and cook in America, and Soma is promptly sent to try out for an elite cooking school called the Totsuki Saryo Culinary Institute.
The female antagonist of Food Wars is Erina Nakiri, a student with an incredibly refined palette, and a gift for metaphor, as she likens an unsatisfactory dish to the sensation of visiting a hot springs only to find out that there is a gorilla staring at her. Full visuals for this scene are of course provided, and it is actually much more funny than some of the other fanservicey scenes that just seem to involve food blowing away peoples’ clothes. Erina judges Soma’s dish and finds it extraordinary despite the fact that he’s making everyday Japanese food instead of something more fancy. She fails him, but he’s let into the school after all when a school administrator tears up the test results after tasting the dish.
I do enjoy food manga, and ordinarily I’d be totally up for reading a few volumes of food battling set in an elite high school. I also liked the theme of contrasting Soma’s expertise in making everyday food with the snobby pretensions of his fellow students. The fan service elements were just a bit too much for me, and there are certainly other examples of food manga that manage to show the transformative experience of eating an excellent dish without resorting to upskirt shots. So for funny food manga, I’d probably recommend that someone with similar tastes as me go with Yakitate Japan or the ridiculous Toriko.
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