Food= Misery (” The Seven Samurai”)

Food is the key element that help every living thing on this earth still exist today. We would do anything  for the smell of the delicious food for any means necessary.   ” The Seven Samurai” by Akira  Kurosawa explains a story about these seven samurai who fight for these peasants after their harvest crop got stolen by the evil bandits. These bandits caused these villagers to starve and the urge for food drives them crazy as they want to fight back but are consume by fear. The villagers then look for samurai that would  help defeat the bandits, but most of the samurai didn’t want to help them because they don’t want to ruin their reputation and they are not hungry. The only way to get samurai to help such a poor village is starving  Samurai as the wise man in the village said. So they found 6 samurai and the last one was a drunk, would be  samurai named Kukichiyo.

In one of the scene,  Kukichiyo and the villagers brought many weapons and supplies that were use to be old samurai who were killed by these villagers. The six samurai were pissed at the villagers and Kukichiyo, who knows why these farmers have these weapons. He said that farmers are foolish people who use hungry Samurai as a way to pretend that they are hopeless and they are living in fear without enough food and protection. He also said that these people actually have a secret hide out where they have   food and weapons and they use this advantage to find more samurai and killed them for their own use. The reason why these villagers become monsters because of the samurais. The Samurais rape their wives, burn their village, steal their food, and other horrible events. We then realized in the movie that Kiichiyo was born a farmer when Kambei Shimada( leader of the seven samurai) said that he was born a farmer. There is also a scene when Rikichi and Yohei were preparing to make rice for the samurai but the vase of rice got stolen. Yohei was crying and he said that he was hugging the  vase all night, protecting it all night with his  life.  He then picked up the remaining rice that were on the floor and they were in fear, but Katsushiro( Disciple of Kambei) gave them money to help get more rice and prevent punishment. This scene show us that food can bring us to fear and that people would do some cruel thing  just to get a handful of food to fill up their stomach.

     

Food can tear us apart and lead to more misery and pain instead of pleasure and joy. For many years, food have been use as weapons to help defeat someone like poisoning a food . Food is reason that brought most of these people in this movie  to start find these seven samurai and help them to defeat the bandits. If food was not part of the role, the people wouldn’t even find the Seven Samurai and the bandits would not invade the villagers and drive the villagers crazy in the beginning.

Food help relieve the whole population and are use for survival. Food can bring this world to cruelty by killing. For example, we killed a chicken just to eat for our taste and pleasure and we don’t care how the animal feels. This shows that human are just like animals and this give us an example of Social Darwinism and Darwin’s idea. So when you eat another chicken next time, think about the chicken and the sacrifice that the chicken has to make just to fulfill your empty stomach.

Anthony Dk Nguyen