Netflix’s Lust Stories (2018) features four short films directed by Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar. These stories are bound together by the common thread of sexuality and desire, but they are also united by another overarching motif: food.

Food has appeared as a flexible metaphor in various kinds of cinema due to its ability to effortlessly fold itself into diverse visual and narrative crevices. Even a passing allusion to food has the potential to function as an eloquent political statement. For instance, Fabio Parasecoli points out that in Italian neorealist films, such as Ossessione (1943), Sciuscià (1946), and Ladri di biciclette (1948), food served as a vector for debates about political and cultural transformations in a country emerging from two decades under a fascist regime. In Lust Stories, food helps examine the political and cultural underpinnings of companionship and sexuality in a country that has plunged itself into denial about its deeply entrenched social prejudices.