Mary Valetin's secret weapon is a Jiffy clothes steamer. "You have to have a steamer with you at all times," the Chicago-based food stylist says. "The one I like to use has a single nozzle. It's strong enough and hot enough to melt cheese again but it is not going to boil everything off of your set." Valetin, you see, is a food stylist and has worked on shoots for Kraft, Starbucks, the American Egg Board, Lipton Tea and a host of other household names.
Valetin's steamer allows food to be "revived for a moment" allowing a photographer to take the perfect shot for an advert, social media post or print magazine. The steamer is just one trade trick helping food stylists produce appetising images that stand out from the aspiring Instagram #foodporn attempts. (For a selection of the worst attempts, see cookingforbae).
Techniques to make food look at its best vary across countries and different professional stylists. Stricter advertising laws in some nations limit what can be done to achieve a desired look, companies have strict rules around how their products should look, and individual stylists set their own limits for how far they will go.
"Primarily it's culinary skills," Valetin says. "A lot of people don't think this. Almost every stylist has a food background of some sort." In recent years, requirements have changed: consumers and advertisers want a more natural look. "It used to be a lot more trick oriented," says Amy Wardle, who's company Astir Food has worked with Hershey, Campbell's and Bertolli. The most important element of food styling for her is beginning with good looking food. Wardle says she only picks the best-looking carrots, holds up lettuces to the light to check for blemishes and finds the most orange of oranges. "I've had people tell me off in the supermarkets for touching everything."
A keen eye aside, the art of food photography requires a trick or two. For advertising, the ultimate goal is to get the best image and sell a product. What you see in the ads is the same as what you end up eating, but that doesn't mean it hasn't had some help. This is exactly why burgers and sandwiches slapped across giant billboards often look far superior to what is eventually served up. But on billboards, you only ever see one side of the burger or sandwich. "The side facing away from the camera looks like a freaking construction site," Wardle says. "Literally with scaffolding: there's cardboard holding up the layers, you have skewers going in like miniature two-by-fours holding it up at the back, there are cotton balls sticking out the back."
Then there's the meat. "If you make a roast chicken and take it out the oven it kind of shrinks slightly and the skin looks a little wrinkly," says Jette Virdi, a food stylist in Ireland who has worked with Guinness. And a wrinkly bird isn't ideal for photographs.
Virdi often undercooks chicken to make it more appealing to a viewer. "The recipe is just cooked slightly different," she says. "You'd probably just cook it really high at the start to get that [crispy look] and then undercook it a little bit so it stays plump."
Wardle resorts to a more extreme approach: superglue. She likens the cyanoacrylate to surgical glue that's able to close wounds. It's also useful for conducting chicken and turkey skin grafts where one visually appealing piece of skin in shifted to a leg or breast.
Different meats come with their own dilemmas for food stylists. When red meat oxidises it turns brown. "As soon as it has gone past that exact ideal moment it starts to look unhealthy, it can really look like a medical experiment photograph," Valetin says. The secret to making it look good? A blowtorch for giving a charred look on the outside while keeping a medium-rare inner. Sous vide can also keep red meat tender and ready for its moment in the spotlight.
The same goes for fish, says Miguel Mesquita. The Portuguese chef who works for magazines and also as a stylist says fish can be one of the trickiest food items to capture in photographs. "We use a lot of techniques on colour and enhance the product as much as we can," he says. These include water and oil sprays to introduce shine and a clothing iron to melt cheese that's on top of dishes. Tweezers are also used to make the final adjustments.
"For beer we use a lot of shaving foam," Mesquita says. "Sometimes we use those capsules for anti-acid capsules to promote some more sparkling." Wardle says: "I have been known to spray Scotch Guard all over toast, English Muffins and pancakes."
The techniques used in food styling, particularly in advertisements, can often tread the line on what's acceptable and what's deception. Mesquita adds that in recipes printed in books and magazines the photography is more reliable than advertisements. When normal people will be recreating dishes, he says, they have to be able to produce something similar to the recipe they're following.
The most famous case of deception dates back to the 1960s and features Campbell's Soup. A group of law students from George Washington University created a protest group called Students Opposing Unfair Practices (SOUP for short). The organisation picked up on comments from Robson Ballantine, who had worked on Campbell's Chicken & Stars Soup.
To help the vegetables in Campbell's soup stay at the top of the dish, marbles were placed into the bowl. The protest led to the US Federal Trade Commission stepping in to force Campbell's to not use the technique again. Corrective advertising – where adverts are paid for and placed by a company found to have wrongly promoted its product – was a concept created from the Campbell's case.
In the years since, Taco Bell has produced corrective adverts after it was discovered its beef wasn't entirely beef. Oats were included in a recipe and classed as meat. In the UK, misleading advertisements have their own set of rules and guidance that are enforced by the Advertising Standards Agency.
However real or faked food photographs are, they have one thing in common.: they take a lot of time to produce. Valetin says on average she can get around six shots of a product a day. This slow progress is caused by clients being picky about what they want, photographers taking their time over capturing the correct images and often the food itself.
"If you're doing a grilled cheese sandwich, you can only steam it so many times, then the cheese doesn't want to co-operate any more," she says. "The bread starts to take on humidity from the steam and then doesn't look toasted."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
