A Harte Appetite

Remember the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper"? In my favorite scene, set over 200 years from now, a physician can't believe how people dieted in earlier times. "You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?" he asks. His colleague answers, "Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

In his monumental work Ulysses, James Joyce suggested that God made food and the devil made seasoning. But even the Bible speaks admiringly of mustard seed, the basis for one of the world's most popular condiments.

The mustard plant is fully deserving of accolades. For centuries its been used as a food, flavoring and folk remedy. In fact it was so important as a medicinal herb to the ancient Greeks that they credited their god of medicine for its creation.

The late Will Rogers once observed, "the movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself."

Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does just that during the Academy Awards Ceremony in Hollywood.

Afterwards, participants attend a dinner catered by Wolfgang Puck.

But the relationship between movies and food started long before Puck began planning his menu. The history of Hollywood is replete with movies that have appealed as much to our stomachs as to our hearts and souls.

The Roman emperor Nero had a mercurial personality. For example, he killed his wife by kicking her when she was pregnant, but then he gave her the most lavish funeral imaginable. He burned on her pyre all of the cinnamon in Rome.

A few years ago 50 baboons somehow managed to escape all at once from the wildlife preserve at the Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati. It took four days to get them back to their lairs and though a tranquilizer gun was instrumental in the process, a far more effective tool was the Hostess Twinkie.