The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Food for the Soul

Mako is a college student who is so meek she can't even go into restaurants by herself. But after running into her old elementary school friend, Shinon, she finds herself joining the Food Culture Research Club—which turns out to be a bit different than she expected.

Food for the Soul is an original anime from the mind of Non Non Biyori's Atto. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Food for the Soul is much more my speed than today's other premiere, mono. For one thing, I love to cook—carrots are roasting in the oven, lentils simmering on the stove, and a bowl full of grated cheese in my kitchen as I type this. I daresay an interest in food is more universal than an interest in action photography, but as I'll discuss in a minute, that turns out to be a double-edged sword here. More importantly, Food for the Soul has a touch more bite to it, more acid and salt to its flavor, than mono.

It's still quite gentle and sweet overall; it's more like a pound cake with some lemon zest added than a whole lemon tart. The girls of the Food Culture Research Club are all quite kind, including Kurea, who offers to give Mako her sauced katsudon at her mother's restaurant when they run out just before Mako puts in her order. However, any show with as dead-on accurate a description of mental illness as this has the potential to do something with it. If you suffer any kind of anxiety disorder, Mako will hit like… okay, I want to continue using lemons in my metaphors here. Like a lemon to the eye? Sure, let's go with that. Not just in how she gets home from a mildly pleasant social interaction and immediately starts screaming at herself about all the ways she's messed up, but in her description of how over time she became more nervous about trying new things and putting herself out there, leading to her slowly withdrawing. Like, damn, get this girl some Wellbutrin or Mirtazapine.

The only problem is that, unlike Kurea's katsudon, I'm not sure this show has the sauce. The day-to-day animation is as pretty as we've come to expect from P.A. Works, but the cooking animation is… Look, food anime is as crowded a field as restaurants in New York City. You have to bring something special to the table, especially if you're focusing on Japanese homestyle cooking. And Food for the Soul isn't doing that. The preparation sequence is done entirely via tight close-ups of Kurea's hands, completely removing the sense of who is preparing the food and the satisfaction they get from it. The motion was slightly jittery, instead of smooth and confident. The slightly pastel color palette, pleasant when it comes to characters and backgrounds, makes the food look washed-out and undercooked. It's just… not appetizing. When you exist in the same world as Delicious in Dungeon, Today's Menu for the Emiya Family, Sweetness and Lightning, and even Wakakozake, you have to do better than that.

Food for the Soul isn't winning any wars. It wasn't fresh-baked enough to get a big reaction from me. I didn't want to shove it in my mouth. It didn't transport me to another world. It was nice, but didn't make me say, “Pshuuuu.”

Watching Food for the Soul immediately after finishing the premiere for Mono was an interesting experience, because it helped me realize that I liked Mono even more than I thought I did. Both shows come from the “Cute Girls in a Club Doing Hobby Stuff” sub-genre of slice-of-life cartoons, but Mono has the texture and substance that I feel Food for the Soul is lacking. I didn't have a bad time with Mako and her cooking pals, to be clear, but the show is already starting to fade from my memory, and I can almost guarantee you that I will have forgotten covering it entirely by the time the week is out.

Is it possible that my brain is simply rejecting the prospect of another anime about anime girls who are obsessed with food after covering Studio GoHand's most recent crime against nature? Absolutely. If we were going to try and dissect what Food for the Soul is lacking on its own merits, though, I'd say that there's just an intangible sense of depth and substance that this anime struggles to convey. If I were to resort to hacky food metaphors, I'd probably go on at length describing how certain recipes ask you to add small amounts of seemingly inconsequential ingredients, like soy sauce or tomato paste, which end up contributing greatly to the overall flavor profile of the meal. Food for the Soul is missing that extra tablespoon of Kikkoman in the broth, as it were.

Maybe it's the glossy sheen on all of the visuals or the floofy-haired character designs that put me off, too. Again, nothing about this production is bad, but Mako and her friends all end up coming across as stock, almost soulless stand-ins that exist merely to follow the tried-and-true formulas that have worked a thousand times before. It's ironic, really, that a show all about the joys of creating a good meal from scratch would represent the anime equivalent of a fast-casual dining experience. Sure, a trip to Chipotle might technically be a step-up than just dipping through the McDonald's drive through, but we're still talking about an assembly line process for delivering cheap, convenient products. Damn it, there I go with the food metaphors, again…

Point being, while I'm sure there will be plenty of fans of Food for the Soul out there, I can't say that I am feeling all that enthusiastic about the show. It's perfectly fine, but there are just too many shows coming out right now that are overflowing with creativity, vision, and flair. “Perfectly fine” just doesn't cut it, this season.

I do really want a bowl of katsudon right now, though.

Food porn—especially animated food porn—has never been my thing. When I hear people gush about food in anime, it goes completely over my head. Then there is the whole aspect of a group of cute girls getting together and just hanging out and going on super low-stakes “adventures.” I've never really seen the appeal and get bored of such shows insanely quickly—which makes this anime a perfect storm of things I am not interested in. However, that's not to say that there isn't anything to talk about with this one.

Mako, as a character, feels almost alien to me. While I've known more than a few introverted people in my day, she takes things to a new level. She's so anxious socially that she fears her every word will be taken as an unintentional insult. She literally runs from conversations and even engaging with store clerks is nearly beyond her. Then there is her hangup about going out to eat alone. Even the concept feels unthinkable to me—and all this comes together to make her an intriguing character.

This is doubly true because it doesn't feel like her anxiousness and anxiety are completely her fault. She used to be, if not outgoing then at least social. But the older she got, the more afraid of rocking the boat she became—until she gradually turned into the girl we see on the screen. It makes me wonder if there is some subtle social commentary going on here—that in our online world where less and less personal interaction is needed in everyday life, people like Mako fall through the cracks and remain a bit stunted in their social skills. …Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

As is par for the course when it comes to P.A. Works anime, this show looks great. It's got detailed backgrounds, smooth animations, fun character designs, and great colors. But in the end, none of that is enough to grab me. I'm sure those who love food and slow life anime will be head over heels for this one. I'm just not one of those people.