Gilmore Girls “There’s the Rub” Episode: Why I Love & Hate It
By Erin Griffin Collum
Comfort food, high school love quadrilaterals, and Emily accidentally flirting. What more could you want? How about a helping of self-love and belonging too?
Love It and Hate It
Is there an episode of your favorite tv show that you love to hate? Do you cringe every time you watch Andy Bernard punch that wall in The Office? Or give yourself a headache with the tension of Rickon running away from Winterfell (Zig-zag, Rickon! Zig-zag!)? Okay, I just hate to hate that one.
Gilmore Girls “There’s the Rub” (season 2, episode 16) is that kind of episode for me.
Gilmore Girls is a top comfort show in my rotation (Kim’s Convenience, Jane the Virgin, or Parks and Rec, anyone?). What's more comforting than all the beautiful food that Rory and Lorelai share? Luke’s burgers and pancakes, Emily’s decadent spreads, and Sookie’s trays of taquitos and mac ’n’ cheese are a huge part of the coziness and belonging that many of us feel when we watch the show.
The food that Lorelai and Rory eat is the stuff of identity. The scenes where they rampage through Taylor’s grocery store show them calling out to each other with so much familiarity and assumption about what foods they will buy — red vines, marshmallows, and a massive jar of peanut butter, obviously.
I love these scenes, and I love the show, but there’s certainly a lot to hate about it too. Let’s dive in!
Reasons to Hate This Episode
The scheduling snafus, high school love triangle (or quadrilateral: Rory, Dean, Jess, and Paris this time), and group effort in white-lying are a trainwreck. I can’t look away.
“There’s the Rub” is like two parallel one-act plays with a series of misunderstandings and near misses. Emily and Lorelai go to a spa for the weekend, and Rory is home alone, planning for a night to herself. Rory looks forward to ordering the Indian food that Lorelai hates — a huge reason to hate this episode is the underlying racism in calling Indian food “smelly.” She plans on doing laundry with her own sorting method that Lorelai makes fun of. Do any other introverts feel calmer just hearing about her plans?
Rory puts off Dean to have the night alone, even though her plans, of course, go terribly awry. Meanwhile, Emily and Lorelai are trapped in a too-zen spa without caffeine and only vegan food options. The word “mungbean” is tossed around. Lorelai convinces Emily to leave the spa in search of a steak.
Reasons to Love It (Spoiler, They're All Food)
Many of the food-related scenes in Gilmore Girls demonstrate how food helps us belong to each other. I love the community in the show, and this episode is an excellent example of it. Paris and Jess stop by unannounced. There’s group studying, playful arguments over the Beat Generation, and fast food binging. What’s better than that?
Some of the food I love in this episode:
Luke’s. The episode starts at Luke’s during renovation and Jess wryly hands Rory an umbrella that prevents a chunk of drywall from falling on them. The sense of community is always strong at Luke’s. It’s even stronger when someone saves you from a drywall-related injury.
Rory’s order at Sandeeps: Garlic naan, samosas, vindaloo, yes, please.
Lorelai’s dinner order: Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail, and steak — a combo that she describes as “so Casino, Big Joe, steak and shrimp.”
Luke’s again! Delivered by Jess: fries with salt and pepper dip and mac ‘n’ cheese, with a side of literary criticism.
Gilmore Girls Food Rituals
Throughout the series, food shows how people belong to each other. Lorelai and Rory have rituals around food:
They get the same kind of pizza and then grate extra cheese on it every time.
They go to Emily and Richard’s each Friday for three-course meals (at a minimum).
Lorelai criticizes her mother that she should know what cocktail she drinks because she always drinks the same thing.
They look forward to Danish Day at Luke’s and apple tarts at Emily’s Christmas party every year.
Luke often brings them dishes without much prelude because he knows what they’ll want or they have code for their regular orders at Luke’s (“We’ll have two coffees and a rant meal.” season 2, episode 2.)
Food and Belonging
We all feel and know how food has the power to connect us to one another. As a middle and high schooler, I watched Gilmore Girls religiously with my best friend, and I went to the beach every year with her family. The first thing we did, after dropping off our luggage at the rental, was head to Publix to stock up on food for the week.
She and I always bought Fritos Honey BBQ Twists and Starburst FaveREDS. It was our ritual. We ate them stretched out on our towels on the sand after boogie boarding for hours. Our fingers would grow greasy and tinted from the chips, and we would just wipe them on our beach towels and keep reading our novels.
The food, the setting, the ritual all filled me with a sense of belonging and rightness. I was loved. I was included. I was in on the familiarity and assumption — we didn’t have to discuss our junk food choices. Like Lorelai and Rory, we separated, sped through the aisles, and came back with exactly what we needed. Connecting over food is powerful and beautiful.
What Gilmore Girls Taught me About Being Different
However, instead of focusing on connection through food, “There’s the Rub” uses food to highlight differentiation. For both Rory and Lorelai in this episode, food helps them differentiate from others. They both know what they want to eat, and what they want isn’t acceptable in their context.
Lorelai and Jess make fun of Rory for ordering Indian food, and the spa clearly looks down on caffeine and meat consumption. This episode shows how food choices help us differentiate ourselves from others, and this differentiation is crucial to belonging to ourselves. And belonging to ourselves is tied to how we experience belonging in a community.
In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown writes that “We can only love others as much as we love ourselves.” Our capacity to give and receive affection and belonging is limited by our capacity to love ourselves. From one moment to the next, this thought fills me with joy, then horror, then back to joy again.
The horror is that this self-love thing is grueling work. I’m supposed to love me? But I’m with me all the time … On the other hand, there is joy in seeing my capacity for genuine feelings of affection and belonging grow as I grow in loving myself.
This episode taught me that it’s worth being different to love ourselves through our food choices. It’s worth leaving the spa for a steak.
Belonging to Ourselves Through Our Differences
My real version of a Gilmore Girls food moment is when my husband makes sourdough bread. When we each eat a slice — fresh from the oven, slathered in butter, and generously sprinkled with coarse salt —our bodies take in the wheat and fat and salt.
Our bodies take in the earth. Our bodies share this universal experience of eating, and of connecting over food, but there’s beauty in the differences too. His bites of bread become him, and my bites of bread become me.
Many people live with food allergies, Celiac’s disease, intolerances, or mild reactions. We’ve all been made fun of for ordering something different at a restaurant or declining to eat something. We don’t have to look far on the internet to see heaps of jokes at vegans’ expense.
It feels so good to connect over food, that sometimes we forget to celebrate when we don’t. When we choose to care for ourselves through food, we ultimately choose belonging. Although Gilmore Girls “There’s the Rub” shows the many pitfalls of differentiating ourselves through the food we eat, overall it celebrates what it means to belong to ourselves through our food choices.
Really, Order That Steak or Indian Food
Difference can lead to disconnection, but authentic difference from others can also help us belong to ourselves.
It’s easy to see connection and belonging in scenes when Lorelai and Rory bond over food and coordinate junk food binges. It’s easier to feel known and accepted when we’re eating what others are eating than when we’re not. It’s easier to feel like we belong when we order the same thing off the menu or eat the same chips at the beach every year.
It’s a little harder to feel like we belong when we want our version of Indian food or a steak. But differentiating from others is a way of loving, too. It helps us love and belong to ourselves.
The Gilmore Girls “There’s the Rub” episode is a beautiful trainwreck that I’ll continue to rewatch for a long time to come. I’ve always obsessed over it and debated the ethical ups and downs with my husband and friends, but I didn’t know why until I listened to this Our Faith in Writing podcast episode with Charlotte Donlon. Her thoughts on Gilmore Girls helped me make the connection between food and belonging. If you don’t know the Our Faith in Writing podcast, this is a great episode to start with.
I know what foods help me connect to others — from Fritos to sourdough bread — but now I’m wondering: what foods do I eat to belong to myself? What about you? What do you eat when your partner is out of town, or you have a gap between zoom calls to sneak into the kitchen alone? What’s your version of Indian food or a steak?
Maybe we’ll discover something in common, or — better yet — something completely different.
Erin Griffin Collum is a writer and editor. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University in 2017 and writes about mental health, embodiment, and identity in her poetry fiction, and creative nonfiction. She is passionate about romance and fantasy fiction. Read more about her editing work at griffincollum.com.
Read more essays and articles by Erin here.