📺

Things I’d completely forgotten about during my first time watching Silver Spoon:

• Hiromu Arakawa’s self-portrait, the one which accompanies all of her author notes in Fullmetal Alchemist, is that of a bespectacled cow
• Arakawa grew up and worked on a Hokkaido dairy farm
• Arakawa also attended an agricultural high school

And during my subsequent rewatch: how easy it is to binge an entire season in one sitting. As the credits rolled on the tenth episode my queue stopped playing for some reason, and I ended up thinking it was a bittersweet and poignant ending to the run. (I currently don’t have access to the second season or the source manga itself.)

A day later I discovered there was actually an eleventh episode but its first half seemed an out-of-place hiccup between the penultimate episode and the epilogue. I mean, I liked stern Komaba’s baseball/family breadwinner balancing act but it took away from what would have been a neater ending.

Episodes are traditionally structured (cold open, shenanigans, central conflict, emotional growth) with the main plot point wrapped up by an episode’s end. Pork Bowl’s fate serves as the overall narrative arc through which the showrunners explore how Hachiken is changed by Ezono, and how Ezono students in turn are forced to rethink their relationships to their family and farms.

The side characters are memorable enough, from the definitely-not-Buddha equestrian club instructor/renegade cheesemaker, Ezono’s offbeat principal, to Hachiken’s crew of misfits. (I see you Tokiwa.)

I watched this after I’d read most of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and select chapters of In Defence of Food; I’m also working my way through Padma Lakshmi’s Taste The Nation, that beautiful and uniquely American love letter to immigrant cuisine. It’s no accident I’ve been gravitating more and more towards non/fictional work relating to the politics of food, the rearing and growing of it and the ways through which it makes it to our plates.

Silver Spoon delights in the ways it tackles these complex moral questions and delves headfirst into a young person’s anxiety about those first tentative steps towards adulthood. Hachiken grows from someone who starts out attending Ezono to escape the pitfalls of urban student life to someone who relishes early morning chores and provides the emotional ballast his cohort needs.

Stray observations

• ‘Hachiken Runs Off’ is the episode I least enjoyed but the heist format and Area 51 parody had me laughing anyway
• the strongest episodes are definitely in the season’s back half, specifically when ‘Hachiken Makes a Huge Mistake’ while working on the Mikage farm
• Bepsi soda, Zapporo beer, or a refreshing can of Mr Pepper, anyone?

Notable quotables