Take your chicken. Baste with wood varnish ...
Those yummy pictures in cookbooks aren't always what they seem.
From The Guardian, Friday 13 October 2006
Here's a great kitchen tip. You know how bowls of soup in food magazines always have a few bubbles rising artfully to the surface, giving that freshly ladled-from-the-tureen appearance? Well, you can recreate this effect quite easily at home by lightly drizzling some washing-up liquid into your soups but, please, only use the best stuff; this is no time to cut corners. Next, take a plastic straw and gently blow into the soup, creating an entire bowlful of bubbles. Using a pin pop away until you are left with just those few artistic ones that will survive for hours. The taste might not be to die for but at least your bowl of soup will look just like it does in the food magazines.
In the curious world of food photography this is the sort of advice that passes for normal. After all, this is the industry that firmly believes that the first taste is with the eye. The importance of culinary aesthetics cannot be overstated. Humans are predisposed to assess food's nutritional value, or lack of it, by its appearance - so get the pictures wrong and you could be conveying the message that this food is not fit to eat. Besides, aspiration sells. Who would buy a book of recipes for dishes resembling what they usually have for tea?
It takes a lot of people to get food looking its best. There can be up to five bodies beavering behind the scenes with their various flexible roles and responsibilities. The photographer and stylist will compose the contents of the dish and decide exactly how they want the picture to work. A props person will source, say, the perfect cake-stand and a home economist will buy ingredients and prepare the food. Finally, the client is often present to make sure that the money they are forking out - a food photographer alone can charge thousands of pounds a day - results in a drool-inducing image.
The simple reason so much work and personnel are involved is that producing beautiful images of food is not easy. For starters there is the small matter that cooked food gives off steam, which can fog up a camera lens. "Lots of things can go wrong," says Georgia Glynn Smith, who has been a food photographer for 10 years and has worked with Nigel Slater, Gordon Ramsay and has just completed work on Allegra McEvedy's Colour Cookbook. "Lighting is probably one of the easiest things to get wrong. If you light a plate of food wrongly then you can make it look grey and cold. Light it wrongly another way and you see the fat and skin forming on sauces. Aside from the lighting there's the problem that if you use the wrong [type of] film then meat comes across as too red."
It's not only technical issues that hamper the shoots. According to Glynn Smith, some foods simply do not have what it takes to make it as a model. "Sausages are these rude, fatty, obscene things. I did a whole book on sausage and mash once and that was a challenge. Then there was an entire book on soups and that was logistically difficult because there's really only so many ways that you can photograph soup."
Perhaps because of these associated difficulties, the industry has developed an impressive repertoire of tricks to enhance the appearance of food. "Let's say you wanted to photograph a roast chicken," says Maureen Murray, a food stylist with more than 10 years' experience. "You can't use a normal roast chicken because from the second that it's out of the oven it starts to go wrinkly, so what you do instead is plump up an uncooked chicken by injecting it with boiling water. Then you either use wood varnish or a mixture of honey, Fairy Liquid and gravy browning and you paint the bird to achieve the roasted colour you want."
Washing-up liquid is by no means the stylist's only secret ingredient; if you have ever wondered how the breads and pastries in photographs get such a beautiful shine and want to replicate this look then you need to go to a DIY shop and ask for some button polish.
Murray also has the answer to one of the most pressing riddles of modern life - why does food never look the same when you cook it as it does on the front of the packaging? The answer is because the food in the "serving suggestion" photo might not even be cooked. "A blowtorch is a very useful tool for a food stylist. Say you were doing a photograph of a beefburger for a restaurant, you might use your blowtorch to cook the outside of the burger to get it looking really crisp and nice but the inside wouldn't be cooked at all. It's easier that way to get it looking absolutely perfect. You can even use the blowtorch to melt the cheese on the burger."
Although these shortcuts are still regularly used, Glynn Smith has pioneered a more natural style of food photography that dispenses with the trickery and fakery and instead relies on capturing the attractiveness of freshly prepared, beautifully cooked food. "I fell into food photography really and I would photograph very much off the cuff. Because I was new to the field it just totally never occurred to me why you would do these fake things to food. I only learned why you might have to do some of them through talking with home economists afterwards. But it's becoming much more acceptable to see food looking real in photographs now." One of the perks of this natural approach, he says, is that you get to eat the food after you have photographed it.
Along with this shift towards a more natural style of photography, greater policing by the Food Standards Agency has also led to the industry adopting a more honest approach. "There used to be a lot of cheating with the photographs for packaged foods," says Murray. "But nowadays you have to be absolutely spot on, so stylists have to work with what you get in the package. That can be quite difficult if you're just working with a basic supermarket lasagne say. You would love to be able to put a bit of parsley or basil on the top to improve the look but you can't, because you would end up with customers coming back into the shop saying, 'Where's my bit of parsley?'".