The Awkwardness of Eating on 'Gilmore Girls'

Lorelai and Rory are known for eating large quantities of junk food. So why do they take such tiny bites of their pizza and burgers?

“People don’t realize it, but it takes years of training to eat the way we do.”

* NOTE: You’re not receiving this rant on Friday not as usual because I’ve had to do some unexpected traveling. Sorry this email is coming to you a little late! I’ll be back on schedule next week. -MB

For a show that has two main characters who are famous for eating large quantities of food without putting on weight unlike most women (it’s one of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s tropes for telling us that the Gilmore girls aren’t like everyone else), watching Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) eat can be frustrating. Well, it’s mostly Rory. And sometimes Lane (Keiko Agena).

I get that fixating on how awkwardly the characters chew their food after taking the smallest possible bites may seem petty, especially since I can’t remember if I noticed these awkward eating habits the first time I watched the show or after rewatching every episode 100+ times. (But what is a rant if not a petty fixation?) I also get that it’s eat-acting, that the actors couldn’t possibly eat all the food their characters consume in a single episode without getting sick. Actors often have to do multiple takes of a scene, and the Gilmore Girls cast have admitted to having spit buckets on hand when they did several takes, especially during those Firday night dinner scenes.

My frustration isn’t just with how Lorelai and Rory eat, but how the show seems to be saying that these two beautiful women are superior to other women because they eat whatever they want and never diet or exercise. I get why Amy Sherman-Palladino wanted to create two women characters who aren’t sucked into diet culture. Gilmore Girls first aired in the early 2000s when impossibly thin women ate salads and drank diet coke on TV, if we saw them eating at all. With Rory and Lorelai, we got to see impossibly thin women eating Pop-Tarts, but tiny bite by tiny bite. They eat like they’re afraid of food, not like they have an appetite. Next time you’re watching a scene where Rory or Lorelai (but mostly Rory) are eating, notice how awkwardly they hold a burger, pull apart a slice of pizza, over-chew a bite of scone.

It looks like Rory is holding a fistful of sand, not a scone. What bugs me most about this scene is the over-the-top chewing; it’s a scone, not a tough piece of steak. S2 E4 “The Road Trip to Harvard”

Take this scene from S1 E2 “The Lorelais’ First Day at Chilton,” when Lorelai, Rory, and Lane are walking around Stars Hollow holding the crusts from the pizza they’ve just eaten. As a crust enthusiast, I already find it strange that they aren’t eating their crusts while talking. After Lorelai gives Rory her crust because she’s given hers to Lane to make up for all the tofu Mrs. Kim is about to serve, Rory occasionally breaks off tiny pieces and eats them (but mostly she just holds the crust like she can’t think of anything else to do with her hands.

Rory is pulling apart a pizza crust instead of biting into it.

In every eating disorders recovery program I’ve been in, the way Rory is eating her pizza crust would be considered a food ritual. This is a compulsive behavior that people diagnosed with disordered eating use to control what they consume—making it smaller makes it less scary. It’s been a while since I’ve been in treatment, but I remember having to unlearn the habit of breaking up food that is commonly eaten whole like bagles, sandwiches, and, yes, pizza.

This isn’t the only awkward pizza-eating scene in the first season of Gilmore Girls. In E14 “The Damn Donna Reed Show,” Dean brings Rory and Lorelai a pizza they’ve ordered for movie night (or Donna Reed night), and they both hold the same small triangles of pizza with a single bite taken out of them for the whole scene. My complaint might be less about Graham’s and Bledel’s eat-acting and more about the editing that could’ve be done in post-production to make it look like they were actually eating the pizza. That said, Rory is holding her slice like she doesn’t know what to do with pizza (this isn’t the only instance of Alexis Bledel awkwardly holding things).

Notice how the slices Lorelai and Rory are holding aren’t even to scale. They’re much smaller than the other slices in the box.

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My struggles with food have heightened my awareness of how women eat on screen. I want to see them relish food, especially if it’s one of their character traits and crucial to a scene. At the very least, I want to see them take a big enough bite to taste whatever they’re eating. It’s eating in character.

Sandra Bullock is particularly skilled at eating in character, in my opinion. I’ll use this scene from Miss Congeniality to prove my point:

Notice how Bullock as FBI agent Gracie Hart swirls the steak and spaghetti on her plate, takes bites that are too big for her to chew with her mouth closed, and swallows it down with gulps of beer to Vic’s (Michael Caine) horror. His job is to turn the unpolished Gracie Hart into Gracie Lou Freebush, the next Miss America. Part of that work is turning her into a dainty eater, an elegant eater, a woman with a fear of beer and pizza because her body is her career.

The challenge of eating on screen for actors isn’t just about calories but being able to recite their lines clearly. This would, most likely, be a concern for Graham and Bledel who had to deliver a lot of lines at a rapid pace on each episode. But Sandra Bullock is a master of eating and saying her lines, too.

Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett in Ocean’s 8. Bullock’s character, Debbie, is going at a plate of pierogis and latkes with the kind of energy I like to see from a hungry thief.| Warner Bros.

In Ocean’s 8, Debbie Ocean (Bullock) and Lou (Cate Blanchett) discuss their plan to steal a diamond necklace while eating at the beloved NYC East Village diner Veselka. Debbie shoves half a pierogi in her mouth as she tries to explain the plan to Lou, making everything everything she says incomprehensible. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Ukrainian,” Lou jokes. The scene uses the fact that Bullock can’t say her lines clearly with her mouth full of food as a moment of humor between friends, and once Bullock swallows, she delivers the rest of her lines with the perfect timing of taking a bite and talking, taking a bite and talking.

What’s annoying about the eating-while-talking that happens on Gilmore Girls is how obvious it is that they don’t have food in their mouths. The talking-while-eating scene that infuriates me every time I watch it is in S3 E4 “One’s Got Class, the Other One Dyes,” when Lane rushes into Luke’s to tell Rory and Lorelai that she’s excited to start band practice with Dave, Zack, and Brian. She takes Rory’s burger, bites into the top of the bun, then proceeds to “talk with her mouth full” about her elaborate plan for hiding her new life as a drummer from Mrs. Kim. Lorelai interrupts to tell her to swallow, but let’s look closely at that burger Lane took a bite out of.

^ Look! There’s no way Lane got any piece of burger in that bite.

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I could go on about the eat-acting that annoys me on Gilmore Girls:

• The tiny bites of cake Rory and Lorelai take when they’re sampling wedding cakes at Weston’s Bakery in S2 E3 “Red Light on the Wedding Night.”

• The way Rory barely bites into her burger at Luke’s after her coming out ball in S2 E6 “Presenting Lorelai Gilmore.”

• The way Lorelai and Rory take so long to chew a grain of rice or diced vegetable as they eat their takeout from Al’s Pancake World in S3 E14 “Swan Song.”

After Rory tells Lorelai that she’s thiking about sleeping with Jess, they silently chew each grain of rice they put in their mouth.

But I must take a step back—what am I really in a rage about? I’ve let my anger show, which Virginia Woolf says a woman writer should never do in A Room of One’s Own. I’ve just praised Sandra Bullock’s ability to eat in character, comparing it to Lauren Graham’s and Alexis Bledel’s inability to do it convincingly in Gilmore Girls. If I really scrutinize Bullock’s performances where eating is an important character trait, she looks like a beautiful Hollywood actress who can eat the left side of the menu, as she does in Two Weeks Notice, and still look like a Hollywood actress. Once she finished that steak and beer Gracie Hart ate in Miss Congeniality, those latkes and pierogis Debbie Ocean ate in Ocean’s 8, Sandra Bullock probably worked out for hours and did all the healthy things she has money to do. The lines between fiction and reality are blurred. Or, rather, reality leaves its mark on the fiction.

We love watching beautiful, thin women eat on screen. I mean eat-eat. Eat like they have an appetite. I’m obsessed with this because I have an eating disorder and want to believe in the possibility of a Wonka night junk food fest, where I wouldn’t need to exercise for hours and starve myself the next day to feel good again. Perhaps Graham and Bledel felt the same way about their characters: How nice it would be to actually eat like Lorelai and Rory Gilmore. But Lauren and Alexis can’t. There are pressures to stay thin because their bodies are their careers, and this reality is detectable in their eat-acting. I don’t believe the amount of food Rory and Lorelai can eat. Sandra Bullock’s eat-acting, at least, makes me believe her characters until I start to dissect what’s wrong with the message.

Eating pizza during a Willy Wonka movie night, which also included popcorn, marshmallows, cookie dough, and peanut butter.

The message on Gilmore Girls is the problem. Lorelai and Rory Gilmore are superior to other women because “[they] can eat,” as Dean says admiringly of Rory as she goes for another slice of pizza during a Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie night. They can eat and they don’t exercise, because Amy Sherman-Palladino wanted to see two women on TV who don’t care about those things. A noble goal, but Sherman-Palladino fell into the Hollywood trap that the women eating all this food have to somehow stay thin. So Rory and Lorelai are superior to other women because they can eat whatever they want, never exercise, and always stay the same weight. They mock diet culture because they are so far above it.

A recent New York Times article suggests that the reason Gilmore Girls endures and is consistently one of the most popular shows on streaming platforms is that it’s like “comfort food.” I’ll admit that I rewatch the show a lot and love to see comfort foods like Pop-Tarts, Mallowmars, and Hamburger Helper feature prominently. But Gilmore Girls’ message about women and food and bodies is anything but comforting.

Are there any awkward eat-acting moments that annoy you? Share them in the comments on the site.