"The Food Wife" is the fifth episode of the twenty-third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 13, 2011, and was seen by around 7.5 million people during this broadcast. In the episode, Homer feels left out when Marge, Bart, and Lisa join a group of foodies. Their personal blog quickly becomes popular and the trio is invited to a molecular gastronomy restaurant. Feeling pity toward Homer, Marge invites him along. However, after beginning to worry that he will reclaim his position as the parent perceived as the most fun by the children, she sends him to the wrong address. Homer unknowingly arrives at a meth lab, where a gunfight starts as the police burst in.
The episode was written by Matt Selman. It contains several references to different foods and famous chefs, and is largely devoted to the foodie culture, which Selman has said that he "always thought was funny and fascinating. The idea of food as not only something you enjoy eating, but as something that you are so passionate about that you're kind of bragging about it." Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the stars and creators of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, guest starred in the episode as two foodies and performed a hip hop song that makes fun of foodies. Chefs and media personalities Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, and Mario Batali also guest starred in the episode, but as themselves in a dream sequence. Although "The Food Wife" has received generally positive reviews from television critics, particularly for the hip hop song, it has also attracted criticism from certain food critics.
Plot Homer takes Bart and Lisa to a video game convention. Upon their return home, Marge feels upset that Homer gets to be the "fun dad", while she is stuck doing unexciting things with the children. The next Saturday, she decides to take Bart and Lisa to an "X-Games" convention, thinking it will be something fun. However, when they arrive, they are disappointed to find out that it is a Christian event, and the actual name of the convention is "† Games". The car engine dies on the way back and they are forced to stop in the neighborhood of Little Ethiopia, where the three go into a restaurant serving Ethiopian food. Although initially averse to the exotic food, Marge is reminded that she wants to be a fun mom and therefore asks for the most authentic dish on the menu for her and her children. All three of them enjoy the food and are joined by a group of foodies, who share anecdotes on their food adventures. After unsuccessfully trying to persuade a resistant and gluttonous Homer to try their Ethiopian takeout, Marge, Bart and Lisa start their own food blog, "The Three Mouthketeers". The blog quickly becomes popular and the three spend much time together trying out new foods and writing about them.
When the trio gets an invitation to an exclusive molecular gastronomy restaurant called El Chemistri, Homer is angry over being left out. Marge invites him out of pity and he plans to reclaim his "fun dad" title, leaving Marge worried about losing her new bond with the children. In one of her dreams that night, she and the children are trying out new food together with chef Anthony Bourdain when Homer jumps in on a hop ball and eats up everything, taking away the children's attention from Marge. Homer, Bart, Lisa, Bourdain, and other famous chefs that have shown up, such as Mario Batali, then jump away from Marge on hop balls, leaving her by herself. Afterwards, Gordon Ramsay appears next to her, telling her she should not have invited Homer. The next day, she deliberately gives Homer the wrong address to the restaurant.
When Marge and the children arrive at El Chemistri, Homer unknowingly arrives at an illegal meth lab that he thinks is the actual restaurant. He meets the meth dealer and other drug addicts, whom he believes to be food hipsters. Just as he is about to have a taste of the meth (which he thinks is food produced with the help of molecular gastronomy), the police burst in and a gunfight ensues between them and the drug addicts. While the trio eat their meal (deconstructed Caesar salad and miniaturized pork chops) with other foodies at El Chemistri, Marge feels guilty about misdirecting Homer and receives a panicked voicemail from him requesting help. After unsuccessfully asking the other foodies to help save her husband, she, Bart, and Lisa head by themselves towards the meth lab after receiving doggie bags from the chef. After arriving, Marge throws apple pie from her doggie bag into the mouth of the meth dealer, causing a flashback to his childhood when his mother used to make apple pie (a reference to the flashback experienced by the infamous “Anton Ego” in the Pixar's 2007 film Ratatouille). With the help of this distraction, the police subdue him. After Marge apologizes to Homer, they decide to have fun together as a whole family from now on. At Krustyland, Homer gives the kids $50 to enjoy themselves and he decides to spend quality time with Marge.
Production
"The Food Wife" was written by executive producer of The Simpsons Matt Selman. The writing process began around September 2010. According to Selman, the episode mainly revolves around Homer and Marge competing about who is perceived as the most fun by Bart and Lisa, a situation that he thinks parents can identify with in real-life. The episode also focuses heavily on foodies and food blogs. Selman said in an interview with New York magazine's Grub Street publication that the foodie culture is "just a world that I always thought was funny and fascinating. The idea of food as not only something you enjoy eating, but as something that you are so passionate about that you're kind of bragging about it. 'I'm the one who discovered this particular Korean pork-neck soup restaurant,' and you can kind of claim that as yours. The blogging just feeds into that kind of territorial element that I always thought was inherently funny. And when I write Simpsons episodes, I try to start with a world I think is funny, and think, 'What's a good story we can tell in that world, using the characters that we have?'"
Describing himself as "sort of a foodie", Selman has said that food is constantly on his mind and that he particularly likes reading food critic Jonathan Gold's reviews in LA Weekly. He told LA Weeklys Squid Ink food blog that he likes foodies, despite making fun of them in "The Food Wife". He commented that on the show, he has often "taken something that I love, found the one little weird, bad thing about it and harped on that", giving foodies as an example and writing: "You can make fun of them for being pretentious or snobby or taking the fun out of eating. That you'd rather photograph something than taste it is a funny nuance of the phenomenon. That it's more about sticking your flag in something than actually enjoying it. We kind of make fun of foodies, but in real life we actually love them."
Selman was pleased with the finished result of the episode. He noted in the interview with Grub Street that Marge starting to blog about food "does not sound inherently exciting, but the episode itself is actually very exciting, and I'm super thrilled with the way it's turned out." Selman thinks a strong thing about the episode is the fact that, despite Homer's love for food, Homer is not the one that becomes a foodie as one might expect. He explained that this is because although Homer loves eating, "he's kind of a blue-collar kind of guy who doesn't like foreign food, weird food, savoring food, intellectualizing food, blogging about it, photographing it – he just wants to be stuffed all the time."
Cultural references Selman wanted to include things in the episode that "only really hard-core foodies would have any idea what we were talking about. This was like a love letter to foodie culture." Food references featured in the episode include jokes about Sriracha sauce and sous-vide cooking, referrals to chefs Wylie Dufresne, Frank Bruni, and Ruth Reichl, a mention of the soup phở from Vietnam and how to pronounce it correctly, and the inclusion of the El Chemistri owner who is based on the Spanish chef José Andrés (known for using molecular gastronomy). Selman has commented that food produced with the help of molecular gastronomy "lends itself to comedy quite nicely. There's a dish [at El Chemistri], for instance, called Regret. The waiter cries into one's soup when he serves it. The human tear is the final ingredient." The fictional character Swedish Chef is also seen in the episode, and the scene where the meth dealer is reminded of his childhood after eating the apple pie is a reference to the Pixar film Ratatouille, which was written and directed by former Simpsons consultant Brad Bird.
In addition to the foodie culture, "The Food Wife" parodies the video game industry and references games such as God of War, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Half-Life, BioShock, Call of Duty, Dig Dug, Driver: San Francisco, Halo, Lego Harry Potter: Years 1–4, Lego Star Wars, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, Q*bert, Resident Evil: Revelations, Shaun White Snowboarding, and Rayman Origins. In addition, it also references the movie, WarGames, with the video game company, Protovision. In the episode, Homer, Bart, and Lisa visit a video game convention called the Expensive Electronic Entertainment Expo (E4), which is parody of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) that is presented annually in the United States by the Entertainment Software Association. This marked the first time that the family visited a video game convention in The Simpsons. Selman and other staff members on the show had previously visited E3 during the release of The Simpsons video games such as The Simpsons Game. While appearing on GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley on November 11, 2011, Selman commented that "We've been to so many [E3s] and we've been pushed around, and knocked around, and seen so many PR guys [talk] about how hard it was working on their game. We've seen how expensive the food is, and how nuts it is, and the bloggers, and the photos, and just the noises [...] We had to do it on the show."
In the episode, Homer and his children want to see the unveiling of a new Funtendo console called Zii Zu, which is a parody of Nintendo's Wii U console. As he and the children make their way through the crowded convention to get to the unveiling, the screen turns into a first-person shooter game through the eyes of Homer. He uses Frisbees and a fire extinguisher as weapons to get forward. According to Selman, the inspiration for this came from the fact that "if you've been to E3, you know it's insane, it's super-crowded, it's super-loud, and walking through it feels like a video game, like a nightmarish first-person video game of bloggers and nerds. You just want to get the thing that you want to get to."
The title of the episode is a parody of The Good Wife.
Guest appearances