We’ve been learning about food styling in my cooking class lately — specifically how to dress up a dish for a photograph, even if that means using something no one would ever eat.
That ice cream you see above is really a mix of lard, sugar and chopped chocolate chips. In other classes we’ve made fake margaritas, fake beer, and fake coffee. (Jugo Maggi was key.) Next week we’re making mole that’s not really mole.
As someone who loves cooking and photographing real food, this whole thing makes me feel a little weird. I understand the role of the food stylist. He or she is needed to make sure the food photographs well, and to know what happens to food under certain conditions. If I owned a business that produced an unappetizing (but tasty) product, I’d want a food stylist to make the item look its best.
But… haven’t the rules changed, as far as fake food goes? We’re in an era where natural is in. Messy plates. Crumbs. Imperfections, to me, mean the food was made with love. It feels disingenuous to me that we should be promoting food, and at the same time giving off the message that it’s too ugly to photograph.
I have no idea how many magazines and newspapers continue to use fake food. But these classes really got me thinking about how traditional media and blogs continue to move in two different directions. It would be blasphemous for a food blogger to post a photo that wasn’t the real deal. So why is it okay with the rest of the media at large? Is it naive to think that food stylists should use real food, instead of fake?
