Food Stylist's Art, The

Muse, Sep 2005 by Stewart, Doug

Has a delectable ice-cream sundae in a magazine ad ever made your mouth water? Well, your taste buds might be in for a surprise if you could take a bite. Advertising professionals that a scoop of real ice cream melts into a goopy mess under the hot lights of a photo studio. That's why the ice cream you admired could actually have been cold mashed potatoes and food coloring.

But wait-isn't the best way to get a delicious-looking photograph of food to prepare something delicious and take a picture of it? Not necessarily, the members of a bizarre and highly competitive profession known as food styling. These folks are so persnickety, they can spend a week getting a single meal ready for its closeup. If the food is to appear on a magazine cover or a TV commercial, the effort can earn them several thousand dollars.

"When we can, we go for normal cooking, because that's usually going to look the best on camera," says schoolteacher-turned-food-stylist Dolores Custer, there are certain foods that just don't behave for us." One of those is ice cream, she says. This is why Stand-ins for ice cream are sometimes used when meals are photographed (though only, by law, when ice cream isn't what the ad is selling). Custer's own recipe for guaranteed-not-to-melt ice cream is a pound of confectioner's sugar, a third to a half cup of Crisco, and an equal amount of corn syrup. Yum!

Another problem food is turkey. "If you cook it fully, it gets burnt spots," she says. "Then, after it sits out for half an hour, it wrinkles." Food photographers hate wrinkly turkeys. The solution: cook the turkey for 40 minutes, pin back the skin if needed, then paint it an attractive roast-turkey color, using cocktail bitters and gravy coloring. Modern stylists frown on old-school tricks like basting a bird with soap, shellac, or motor oil. Still, undercooked turkeys are as much a health hazard as soaped-up ones, so they're tossed out after a shoot. (Most other foods used in photo shoots remain perfectly edible. In New York City, the food-styling capital of the world, a charity called City Harvest collects the leftovers and distributes them to the homeless.)

For the food stylist, patience is a virtue. Custer has dumped boxes of corn flakes onto a tray and sorted through them, one by one. "I look for what I call flakes with character," she says, "the ones that curl or twist, because perfect flat flakes don't look very interesting in a photograph."

If this is show business, it's not the glamorous end. Imagine baking 80 apple pies to get one that's good-looking enough for a starring role. Or digging through dozens of chicken pot pies to extract the most succulent-looking pea, the most correct carrot cube, and the most perfect chicken chunk, then placing them by hand on the marquee slice of pie as director and crew wait. Stylists are allowed to handpick the prettiest morsels but not to insert them more abundantly than the factory does. Also forbidden: putting marbles in a bowl of soup so that more of the meat and other goodies are forced up to the surface and into camera range.

TV commercials where actors delightedly bite into a product are especially taxing for an off-camera cook. "Once they take a bite from a sandwich or whatever's being advertised, it can't be used again, so you have to prepare things in volume," says New York City food stylist Ricki Rosenblatt. "For one bite-and-smile ad, I cooked maybe 300 hamburgers in five hours." (In case you were wondering, the actors spit out the bite after each take. This is how people in food commercials stay thin.)

For location shooting, a food stylist packs more gear than a soldier on maneuvers: bags and backpacks containing toasters, salad spinners, cutting boards, hair dryers (for melting cheese), staple guns, paintbrushes, dental tools, and more. What they don't carry with them, they race out and buy-200 heads of garlic perhaps, in order to find three that are perfectly shaped and blemishfree ("heroes," as they're known in the trade). Veteran stylist Marilinda Hodgdon maintains what she calls a candy library in her New York City home, just in case an art director needs to shoot, say, Halloween candy in March. "I'm not saying it's fresh enough to eat," she says, "but anytime a job calls for candy canes, I have them."

Nothing puts a stylist's ingenuity to the test more than keeping food looking fresh, hot, and scrumptious in a studio as the hours drag on. Ricki Rosenblatt has slipped pieces of dry ice under a pile of smoked ribs to give them a perpetually steamy, fresh-from-the-smokehouse look. "For coffee," she says, "I'll use an eyedropper to put little bubbles at the edge of the surface as though the cup was just poured. It's actually detergent." Letting cereal get soggy in milk, of course, is a major styling no-no. "Cereal holds up better if you put it in Elmer's Glue," says Rosenblatt.

These tricks are the exception, not the rule, she and other food stylists emphasize. The trend in recent years, especially in fancy food magazines, is to show real, honestly prepared food, as though the photographer were documenting a dinner party. For one thing, the public has become more savvy about what real food looks like. Gluing parsley to a carrot top to make it look healthier isn't going to fool as many people as it once did.