Fast Food Peek-A-Boo
We’ve all had this happen: you go to a fast food restaurant and see a picture on the menu that looks absolutely divine. You order your burger, pasta, fried chicken, etc. and wait patiently. They call your number and you hurry up to the counter. You open up whatever vessel the fast food Gods have used to protect this precious cargo en route to your yap hole. Finally, you hold it up to get some light and… wait a minute… tf is this? This isn’t what you ordered? You ordered something plump, juicy, clean… a well-crafted masterpiece balanced in taste and color, but instead you got something small, smushed, and mostly gray. What gives?
Today we enter the world of Food Stylists.
The time and money put into these pictures is astounding. It makes sense though, I’m certainly not paying for anything that looks like this shit on the right. It’s a worthwhile investment for companies, but you can’t help but feel duped. This isn’t just true for fast food, but that’s where it’s easiest to see. This is also true for packaged food at the grocery store and for the pictures on menus at sit-down restaurants. Here are some of the techniques food stylists use to take these amazing pictures and eventually get you and me to cough up the dough.
Sometimes, the food isn’t even cooked. It’s often just seared on the outside or even painted. Brown shoe polish may be used to make a burger look cooked. Then, they can paint on grill marks or get a piping hot skewer and press the lines on one at a time. The buns and patties are not stacked in a straight line, but stacked in a leaning tower so you can see everything. All of the toppings and condiments are put only on the edge hanging out. Food stylists will often take pictures of a B Team product to get the lighting just right, then pull out [the “hero”] to get the money shot. This is especially common for foods that look best when they are sufficiently hot or cold.
I don’t know how to break this to y’all, so let’s just do a heartbreaking lightning round: cheese is dipped in warm water or spot-touched with a hot spatula to look melted, if the picture has melting butter that means the food is definitely cold (imagine how small of a window you would have to photograph butter melting on hot food), ice cubes are probably plastic, pancakes and sandwiches are propped up with cardboard, plastic spacers, and toothpicks, Thanksgiving turkeys are stuffed with paper towels, syrup might be motor oil, the “syrup” isn’t running down the side of the pancakes in an action shot it’s probably just stuck to strips of paper towel, anything shiny or glistening was recently spritzed with a spray bottle of water, antacid and soap are used to make bubbles in soda and champagne, tweezers and glue are used to place individual sesame seeds on buns in a specific arrangement, and THAT PICTURE OF ICE CREAM IS PROBABLY ACTUALLY MASHED POTATOES WTFFFFFFF.
All this is pretty unfortunate, but we do have our savior. Our North Star. Our Benevolent Overlord. McDonald’s. They got called out on twitter for how different their food looks in pictures vs in person, so they took us behind the scenes. McDonald’s doesn’t use anything to make their burger look good that isn’t an actual ingredient used in it’s restaurants. It’s still pretty wild to see the time, money, and attention to detail they put into it. Also photoshop.
P.S. researching this was actually pretty difficult because most of my google searches yielded tips on how to get the perfect #Foodintheair pics for my basic bitch instagram
