Do you remember that precedent-shattering scene in the movie Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as James Bond, when an overeager bartender asks him about his martini. “Shaken or stirred?”

Craig looks disgusted. “Do I look like I give a damn?” he responds.

The scene was supposed to tell us that this was a Bond for our times though Craig did go on to do many of the typical Bond things, including teaching a bartender to make a Vesper Martini.

But the scene served as a self-referential jab at the (mostly phoney) snobbery that has characterised the character. Much is made of Bond’s love for, and knowledge of, wine. In one movie, he identifies the year in which the grapes for a glass of sherry were harvested with just one sip. (Sherry has no vintage so being able to tell how old the grapes are is a big deal — in the Bond movies, at least).

In the climax of Diamonds Are Forever, the villains enter Bond’s cabin on a luxury liner pretending to be waiters. They show him a bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild they plan to serve with dinner at which, Bond (Sean Connery), smelling a rat, says “I am surprised you haven’t served a claret” using the traditional (if increasingly dated) English term for a red wine from Bordeaux.

The waiters start to make excuses for not having a claret on the ship and Bond knows at once that they are imposters. “Château Mouton Rothschild is a claret” he responds and proceeds to kill them.

Ah, movies and food and wine! There isn’t a lot of food in the Bond books because Ian Fleming, as an Englishman of a certain generation, seemed to have preferred smoking to eating. When James Bond does eat, it is steak, lamb chops, and lots and lots of eggs.

But at least he eats!

When I was a child, I used to read Superman and Batman comics and think to myself “don’t these guys ever eat? “Okay, in the case of Superman, who is a Kryptonian, perhaps he did not need to eat at all. But what about Batman? He must have had to live on a diet of solid protein to build those muscles, right?

And yet, every time Batman and Robin took on the Joker they seemed to do so on empty stomachs. Perhaps it was the unwritten comic book convention of the day: real men, especially those wearing silly capes and lurid tights, don’t need to eat.

I have always believed that a genre only really comes of age when the creators have the imagination to let their heroes eat. The Marvel superhero movies only took off after the success of the first Iron Man film. Though Iron Man was a weird figure in the Marvel comic, the movie broke box office records because Robert Downey Jr reinvented the character.For instance, he longed for cheeseburgers. This was a human touch that made audiences happy — but not as happy as Burger King with whom the production had a tie up.

Gangster movies came of age with 1972’s The Godfather which was loaded with food references, many of them improvised. Apparently, one of the movie’s most famous lines — ‘leave the gun, take the cannoli’ — was not in the screenplay but was added during the shooting of the scene (of a murder, naturally). The most food-glorifying sequence in the movie may have been a scene when the mafia guys ‘’go to the mattresses’ to prepare for a gang war.

Peter Clemenza, a hoodlum who has worked for the Family for years, teaches Michael Corleone (on camera) how to make Sicilian-style pasta with fresh tomatoes and sausage for the family’s soldiers. The idea that these gangsters cared enough about food to make a great pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes while at war went against conventions and established that tough guys not only like food, but they also know how to cook. (They are Italians, after all.)

The Godfather was made by Francis Ford Coppola, a foodie and (later) winemaker so the emphasis on food was understandable. And when Coppola’s daughter Sofia directed Marie Antoinette, she seemed as keen on food. The doomed French queen is surrounded by pastry delicacies from Laduree whose image received a huge boost from the film.

I have no idea what the arrangement between Laduree and the producers of Marie Antoinette was but the most famous example of a character ordering food turns out to have been entirely non-commercial. Readers of a certain generation may remember Popeye from the comic books (he was later played by Robin Williams in a movie) who got his strength from spinach. Every time he was called on to fight the bad guys, Popeye would open a can of spinach, pour its contents into his mouth and suddenly he would be re-energised and re-charged.

As I grew a little older, I guessed that this was obviously a commercial arrangement between the makers of the Popeye cartoons and some canned spinach company. Popeye’s girlfriend was called Olive Oyl so you didn’t need to be a genius to work out the commercial possibilities of that name.

But, it turns out that I was a needlessly cynical young man. There was no commercial tie-up between the Popeye producers and any spinach company. Apparently EC Segar who created the character during the Great Depression just wanted to get children to eat more leafy vegetables.

Now, of course, there is lots of food in movie and on TV (are you watching The Bear on streaming?) but even if you exclude movies and shows that are explicitly about food (like the movie Chef for instance), you will still find many comics, movies, and shows that influenced, perhaps subconsciously, how we look at food and restaurants.

For instance, the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton try (and fail) to boil live lobsters put me (and many other viewers, I suspect) off trying to cook live fish at home. The idea that it was okay to eat pizza with your fingers while you walked on the streets only struck me after I saw John Travolta strutting his stuff to the sound of Staying Alive in Saturday Night Fever. (Travolta actually stacked two pizza slices on top of each other.)

And for many of us, our concept of what Americans ate came mainly from comics. I began to be obsessed with hamburgers after Wimpy, a character in Popeye, began eating them all the time. I believed that all American teenagers went to have milkshakes every day at places like Pop Tate’s from the Archie comics. (And Jughead’s tastes paralleled Wimpy’s.)

Likewise, the American coffee shop of our collective imagination is not Starbucks. It is Central Perk from the Friends TV show. Just as The Godfather’s focus on food made the gangster movie come of age, the centrality of food in Friends ushered in a new kind of sitcom for a new era.

Friends had it all. In one scene Ross complains about how somebody at work ate his Thanksgiving Leftovers Sandwich at which Chandler’s retort (“Ross, it’s only a sandwich”), sets Ross off: ‘That sandwich was the only good thing going on in my life.’ Monica was a chef on the show, Joey loved pizza and such lines as “There are other ingredients than garlic” have passed into the vernacular. (Actually this is a bit of a ‘Play It Again, Sam’ situation; that’s not exactly how the line goes in the show).

So, never underestimate the effect of comics, TV and movies on our attitude to food. Who can forget Anthony Hopkins’ best line in The Silence of the Lambs: “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”?

Certainly not the former (and probably the next) President of the United States who includes a reference to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” in his speeches.

I guess Donald Trump’s love for the character just eats him up.

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