Food Stylist's Art, The

Muse, Sep 2005 by Stewart, Doug

For all the painstaking care that food stylists bring to their work, they sometimes find they don't go far enough. Stylists as a rule may be finicky, but art directors tend to be full-blown obsessives. They're the ones who insist the spaghetti ends be tucked in. Rosenblatt recalls being asked to rearrange the sesame seeds on a hamburger bun. The seeds weren't spaced evenly enough for the director. "I used tweezers and reattached them with airplane glue," she says. "It was a print ad, so no one was going to eat it."

Dolores Custer once prepared a white-chocolate mousse to be photographed. As she was about to plop three raspberries and a piece of mint on top, the art director peered in and noticed, perhaps for the first time, that raspberries have tiny hairs. The hairs, he decided, had to go. "While everyone waited, my assistant and I took tweezers and pulled off all the hairs on the raspberries," she says. It took 10 minutes per berry.

Custer took the request in stride. She runs workshops around the country on how to make food look good, and she always gives her students a list of attributes that every good food stylist should have. "One of the most important," she says, "is a sense of humor."

Doug Stewart writes about art for Smithsonian and animals for National Wildlife. While working in his Massachusetts home, he normally freshens up old coffee by microwaving it, not adding soap bubbles.