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It wasn’t your imagination: Something was off about the food from the start. That first glimpse of cantaloupe and honeydew, arranged in the office to welcome Helly R., played by Britt Lower, was a little unnerving: melons in jagged halves — severed! — filled with anemic, out-of-season fruit.
The food on “Severance” leaves a bad taste in your mouth because it’s as fluent in doublespeak as the show’s most ambitious corporate climbers. In the show’s second season, which wraps up this week, food has acquired all the chilling, spine-tingling dissonance of upper management, refusing your request for a raise with a warm, unflinching smile.
“I always try to design the props and food to have some connection, some metaphorical undertone,” said Catherine Miller, the show’s prop master, who devised Season 1’s melon presentation to fit the “very graphic, very minimal” aesthetic of Lumon’s retro office. “I think food has the ability to define time and place and mood and overall emotional connection — it can become its own character.”
As a character, the food on “Severance” never says what it means and never means what it says. Food at the office might be packaged as an employee perk, a reward for meeting project goals, but even a stack of golden waffles dripping with maple syrup is only there to enforce compliance.
To create the eerie watermelon head, Penko Platikanov, the show’s sculptor, carved melons for a week. He used the dark skin of the fruit to form the hair, letting the white rind peep out at the nose. But each time he got down to the details of Mr. Turturro’s face, the texture was too mushy for definition, the water content too high.
One glimpse inside the Eagan family’s home and it’s clear how their neuroses — their fear and avoidance of messy emotions and appetites — have trickled down, shaping the entire corporation’s ideology.
The penultimate episode opens with Helena Eagan, the daughter of Lumon’s chief executive, in the middle of her tightly controlled morning routine: a swim followed by a cup of coffee and a single egg, cut into six identical wedges.
As Helena eats the egg, in tiny bites, with great restraint, her father watches and criticizes her: “I wish you’d take them raw,” he says, in reference to Kier Eagan’s breakfast of three raw eggs. Helena is technically free, but her mornings are a warped mirror of Gemma’s, Lumon’s tortured test subject.
Gemma, played by Dichen Lachman, has her own exercise program and a daily menu of carefully curated foods. A drawer of Lumon branded pods holds all of her meals: rows of processed starches, meats and vegetables, manipulated beyond recognition.
These meals aren’t supposed to delight. Like that very first melon bar — would you like the green tasteless melon or the orange tasteless melon? — food maintains an illusion of pleasure and choice for Lumon’s most vulnerable captives, who aren’t supposed to experience pleasure on their own terms, or to make real choices. Not at meal time, not ever.
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