Food Stylists and the "Heroes"

All over we see advertisements showing images of food, with juicy, glistening meat and fresh vegetables. Yet, as Hope Bagozzi, Director of Marketing for McDonald's Canada points out,  when you walk into a Mcdonalds and order a burger, you’re likely to find that it looks nothing like what you’ve seen on billboards, magazines, and TV. That’s because food photography is a lot more complicated than just snapping a picture of the first thing the chef whips up. Food companies rely on styling and photography to incentivize customers into buying their food, by making it look almost too perfect to be real.

Source: www.youtube.com

Companies and businesses hire “food stylists,” who will spend hours and hours creating the perfect product to photograph. They dig through up to hundreds of different products trying to find the perfect products to include in the dishes they photograph until they find flawless “hero” ingredients. According to Sarah Lowe, MPH/RD student at UNC, “these heroes are serious business; one food stylist author even recommends purchasing an extra bag of hamburger buns just for the cashier to scan, to protect all the other bags that may contain the hero bun from unnecessary handling.” Not only will they go through the painstaking process of finding the perfect specimen for their picture, but stylists have found tricks to make food more appealing to the eye.

The Reader’s Digest recently published an article titled, “13+ Secrets a Food Stylist Won’t Tell You.” While you might think that stack of pancakes on TV looks good enough to eat right away, you’d probably be shocked to find that the pancakes were cold, with butter, heated by a hairdryer, dripping off the top, and a stack of cardboard in the middle to make them appear fluffier. The foam on a delicious cappuccino is piped on, grill marks on a steak are put on one by one by a hot metal rod, a glistening and plump chicken is completely raw on the inside, and ice cream is really just dyed lard. Although it seems as though companies might as well make fake food products instead of trying to perfect real food, there are actually laws against this. Lowe brings this to light, stating that “The Federal Trade Commission prohibits a ‘false impression of the grade, quality, make, value, currency of model, size, color, usability, or origin of the product offered’, which fortunately restricts food companies to actually using their own product in their advertisements.” So, sellers are willing to spend the money to hire a food stylist and food photographer to make an idealistic image of their food.

Source: www.gourmet.com

When consumers are hungry, an image of a delicious looking hamburger can make their mouths water. In fact, hunger is one of the most powerful incentives a person has. Driving down the highway on a long road trip, there are billboards for fast food restaurants all over the side of the highway. Using these photos of perfect food that precisely displays all the details of the ingredients, restaurants are able to grab the attention of those drivers who are tired and hungry by making them crave the satisfaction of the product they are seeing.  

Future Research: What are the arguments for and against photoshopping models and celebrities?