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As a story, Food Wars walks a well-trodden path, focusing first and foremost on Soma's ambition to reach the highest echelons of Tōtsuki Academy and surpass his father in terms of culinary skill. Despite the school setting, characters are rarely shown learning or training, instead preferring to throw its leads from one sink-or-swim challenge to another, trusting the audience to assume that they already have the necessary skills with maybe a flashback or post hoc explanation as to how the characters developed them. This isn't an invalid method of storytelling per se, but it's easy to see how some people could be turned off from the show because of it. Characters that play antagonistic roles will generally show some combination of smugness, elitism and outright corruption, to the point where one starts to wonder if Tōtsuki is even that good of a school. For example, in an early episode, the character Erina Nakiri oversees the school's entrance exam and refuses to admit that she enjoys Soma's cooking, causing him to fail. In another, an instructor attempts to expel Megumi for altering a recipe, despite having only done so to compensate for the deliberately poor produce that she had been forced to use. As such, the show ends up fighting an uphill battle when it inevitably attempts to portray these characters in a more understandable ore even sympathetic light.
To conclude, much as I may gripe, Food Wars is generally an entertaining anime. While it struggles to stretch its premise out over a length of 24 episodes, its makes a valiant effort throw new obstacles at its lead characters and provide a range of competitive cooking scenarios for the audience to enjoy. Fans of all things culinary will likely get more
enjoyment out of the series than most, but for a more conventional shounen-watching audience,
there are certainly worse ways to make use of one's time. Those who prefer a more ambitious storyline to spectacle or have little patience for repetition, however, may wish to give Food Wars a miss.
