Food Advertising vs Reality

[Alex]

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.