Food Advertising vs Reality
 

A German website compares pictures of food in advertising to the actual food product.

Some are surprisingly accurate while others are like seeing a model sans make-up and PhotoShop.

Soups seem to have the hardest time.

Hmm I've eaten a few of those.

I've always known about the art of food photography, and how it has to look perfect and delicious ... and alas, often quite different than the actual food.

But recently I found out a client of ours has the odd (never before known to me) profession of fashion food chef.

She's the person who creates the food that's photographed. It's edible stuff, but not created for taste or even for good appearance in a restaurant ... but specifically for good appearance in photographs.

Apparently, it's an art in itself.



I never knew!

Oh no! Those bastards! They lied about the Kaiser spikes! I only bought it because of Kaiser spikes and now my whole day is ruined.

There was an article at Slate a couple years ago that went into what is allowed and not for food packaging photography. It was pretty interesting. Bowls of cereal never actually use milk, etc.

But I'm always upset when I have Japanese food that it never looks as plasticy as the window promised.

I knew that there were people who specialized in photographing food, but didn't really think about the people who make a living making the food to be photographed. Ah, the many facets of advertising.

I've found the art of food photography fascinating. I've known about it for years, I forget where I actually learned about it.

With some of those soups, I wonder if they had stirred the soup, would the pieces of meat and veggies have come to the top.

Along the same lines: Is the spoonful of Honey Bunches of Oats on the box a typical spoonful?

Makes me glad I consume very little in the way of packaged foodstuffs.

One or two of the tiramisu varieties looked rather good, though.

From the OP's site, here's a good one:
http://pundo3000.com/htms/7.htm

Oh dear... no amount of advertising can make this look good:
http://pundo3000.com/htms/12.htm

A lot of these are foreign products, so I don't know what the rules are, but I believe in the US, as long as everything shown is actually in the product, it can be arranged any way they want. So, taking that rice ball example that Morrigoon just posted, as long as the amount of carrots, peas, and spices (I think that's what all of that is) is somewhere in the actual ball of rice, it's perfectly allowed. It doesn't matter that in the picture they just all happened to be located around the outside instead of evenly spread through the whole thing as they are in reality.

Years ago, we studied such things in a media class. Back then, photoshopping wasn't an option (although airbrushing was) and the photogs had to get real creative. Vaseline on the lens, plastic ice cubes, Elmer's glue instead of milk, and so on. It was a fun class, and I've never looked at advertising the same since- especially food ads.

Elmers?! Really?! The irony!

Milk shows up another color (I want to say yellow or green, but it may be blue), so glue is used as a substitute.

Plus the hot studio lights tend to make food go bad quickly.

My understanding is that the law regarding food photography in advertising is that the actual item being sold must be real in the photographs (of course, that doesn't mean you can't do just about anything you can think of to make it look better) but that surrounding items can be fake.

So, if you're selling cereal you can use fake milk but not cereal in the photo. But if you were selling milk you could use fake cereal but not milk in the photo. And you can have 45 toothpicks inside the hamburger you're photographing to keep it perfectly formed and perky.

But that is coming from dim recesses of my brain so I may be misremembering or have learned untruths.

For this reason, I've heard that mashed potatoes are used in lieu of ice cream.

On a movie set, that's often been the case. But for close-up photography, it would be very difficult to get smashed taters to look like ice cream.

Icecream is a good example - the potatoes get that cracked rough texture when scooped, which is what they want, real icecream would be a smooth ball usually. I have this from a friend who did said photography.

Think McDonalds burgers with someone anchoring each individual sesame seed with flour paste so they're spaced evenly, and plastic tubes in t he burger to provide that drop of "meat juice" (or catsup, sometimes) that rolls out of the burger when filmed.

I'd love to do a course on food photography.