Food styling

Menus in restaurants often feature pictures of delicious food. Well food stylists who design food take these photos and their goal is to make it visually appealing. After all, who wants to order a burger that has a picture of overcooked, old-looking meat with a soggy bun and limp lettuce that doesn’t have a lot of filling? Not me.

From the movie Buy Me That!

That’s why food stylists are here. They make sure they choose the best bun (even if it involves gluing on sesame seeds and painting it with plastic to make it shiny). Then they use a blowtorch to add grill marks to the burger and use toothpicks to prop up the bun and make it seem like it has more fillings than it actually does. They then choose the perfect lettuce leaf from hundred of different bunches of lettuce. I would not want to eat that burger.

So why do we depend so much on pictures to determine the foods we order? It’s because our culture is so reliant on things that are visual. We could rely on food descriptions that describe the burger, but most of us would rather choose the few items that stand out and appeal to our eyes. I suppose the same thing applies to advertisements. I know lots of people who buy a certain brand of cereal because the packaging looks much more visually appealing than the generic cereal.