Actor: Just remember this: Theatre is an illusion. Bourbon is Tea. Champagne is Ginger ale. Everything is something else. Now, when it comes to food, there's just one rule: everything on stage is bananas. Mashed potatoes are bananas mushed up. Even steak is bananas pushed together.
Prop Boy: But steak is brown.
Actor: You leave bananas out, they get brown.
— Frank Langella, Those Lips, Those Eyes
Food seen in commercials has often been improved for the purpose of shooting the commercial. Lettuce will always be crisp, hamburger buns perfect and full, cake light and fluffy. Ice cream is never melting, unless that was the point. As good as the food may be made to
look, however, actually
eating that specific example is probably hazardous to your health.
For starters, the food may have been coated in shellac to ensure that it stays looking good no matter how many takes are done. This is somewhat reasonable, as heat from any lamps being used can cause things to wilt.
Food is also often shot with camera angles and zooms that make it look larger than it actually is. This mostly applies to premade food products such as hamburgers or ice cream sundaes. Essentially, it's the
Hitler Cam as applied to food.
For a good example, watch a Dairy Queen ad for their
Peanut Buster Parfait and compare how large it appears with what you actually get in the restaurant. You will notice that you rarely see an actor's hands in the picture to give you a sense of scale.
The items used for photo layouts and "beauty shots" are often not even edible. Ice cream sundaes are often constructed of scoops of lard or mashed potato covered in motor oil, or other toxic-yet-pretty trickery. Likewise, "steam" rising from "hot" food is often smoke from a hidden cigarette, and ice cubes will really be deftly sculpted chunks of acrylic.
Note that, in general, truth in advertising laws require that the product being advertised should be the same as the one shown (though some of the tricks described above are still applicable), so, for example in a commercial for chocolate syrup, the syrup will be real, but the ice cream onto which is is poured is just as likely to be made of plasticine. The cereal shown in the bowl is, indeed, the product, but the pouring stream of milk is almost always glue.
See also
Frothy Mugs Of Water as a result of when actors have to eat or drink in a shot; if you're likely to be doing a lot of takes, it's a bad idea to down a glass of real alcohol in each one.
Examples:
- Showcased on this site: Ads vs Reality
- Japan has an entire industry dedicated to producing realistic wax models of a client restaurant's bill of fare for permanent display in the restaurant itself.
- In fact, there's a block or so of Tokyo's kitchen district, Kappabashi-dori, dedicated to this. It's worth a visit, and you can purchase USB drives and refrigerator magnets that look like realistic sushi.
- The film Big Night was set in an Italian restaurant, and all the food was undercooked to look better on screen. The actors would spit it out between takes.
- Milk is hard to photograph: under studio lights it often comes out looking bluish and translucent. The "milk" you see in cereal-box photographs is actually a 50/50 mixture of whole milk and PVA glue.
- Or sometimes yogurt. And if a cereal box shows a splash of milk, the splash shape is molded from plastic, which is of course easier than trying to photograph a real splash at exactly the most photogenic moment.
- Exception: in Coupling, actor Ben Miles decided that his character Patrick was a Guinness drinker. This may have had something to do with the fact that Guinness is very difficult to fake convincingly, so while his fellow actors were drinking coloured water with foam on top, he was drinking genuine Guinness...
- Ben Miles is obviously the greatest genius ever to have acted on television.
- In The Simpsons Krusty the Klown is often seen to be disgusted with what he actually has to eat during commercials for his restaurant chain, and spits it out when the camera is off.
- This may have been a reference to George Forman, in which leaked footage showed him spitting out food cooked by his signature grill.
- Which is actually what they do when people eat for a shot. After 30 takes he would have been throwing up with all he ate other wise.
- Often those products are pork-based and Krusty is a Jew...
- Call him out of practice, then; Krusty has his own line of pork products and a ham, sausage and bacon sandwich named after him.
- In the Oh My Goddess: Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses manga, one of the strips depicts an anime voice artist (loosely based on a real person) who has a fetish for touching fake food samples and gets Squicked if they turn out to be real.
- On stage, food props are almost always real food of some kind (if not the food they're supposed to be) because actors have to eat it onstage. Alcohol, however, is almost invariably fake because of the hazards of the actors getting drunk in the course of performing the show. This troper has heard horror stories of productions of things like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that ended in messy catastophe because the actors got hammered on real alcohol.
- Two real life subversions: Glamour shots for actual ice cream, not sundaes, are a special skill. Entire cartons of ice cream will be used to make the perfect scoop, which much then be photographed quickly and perfectly before it melts. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Brooklyn, NY is full of fried chicken restaurants that display pictures of their menu items in the front window. These photos are of actual food items, and thus look completely disgusting. At least they have chicken.
- The last can be applied to some eateries in This Troper mother third-world country, who had photos of its most popular foods. Some places have even real samples of its food in exhibition, who change inter-daily. Anyway, while rarely looking appalling and disgusting, those photos and samples rarely look that delicious either.
- Greek restaurants, traditionally, do not have menus. Diners are lead through the kitchen and invited to lift pot lids to decide on a meal. In places where health laws prevent such tours, there is often a wall of photos of all of the dishes to help diners choose. Usually the experience is WYSIWYG.
- The owner of Candyblog swears that always uses the real candy she reviews in the photos of her reviews. Gratuitous Food Porn!
- The Food in Real Life blog owner reviews convenience foods, comparing the photo on the box to what's actually in the box and how it tastes.
- A recent episode of The Gruen Transfer, a show about advertising, has an advertising executive mention that flowing molten chocolate in television ads is generally substituted with brown paint.
- Another describes in depth the process of making a steak appear appetizing. The final touch is apparently to soak a tampon in water, microwave it, and then put it under the steak to create those lovely wafts of steam.
- Pictures of hot chocolate will often involve adding dish soap to the liquid to make it bubbly.
- To photograph a roasted turkey, this troper is informed that you roast it in a hot oven for half an hour or so, just long enough for the skin to swell up and look plump and tasty, and then paint it a delectable golden-brown with soy sauce.
- Sometimes iodine is also used.
- Subverted in Glass Mask. Maya is playing a character that's supposed to eat manju on stage. Some of the other actors, who aren't happy to be performing with her, switch the real manju with mud balls. Which Maya then eats anyway, since to do otherwise would disrupt the play.
- As if "D-FENS" wasn't dissatisfied enough in Falling Down, when he asks for lunch in a fast-food restaurant, his burger looks nothing like the one in the menu board.
- "Comsumer Reports For Kids" detailed in one issues some of the trickery used when photographing burgers for advertising, including not fully cooking the patty so that it doesn't shrink, basting the patty to look more done, and using tootpicks inside the burger to neatly stack the vegetable slices higher so the burger looks larger.
- In Ghost in the Shell Cyborgs who do not need to eat still eat food that look like real food but isn't.
- As a pastry chef, usually a standard part of training is learning how to make 'display' versions of your normal desserts. Any restaurant you see with a cart of desserts displayed usually has at least a bit of lard on the plate.
- Related is making display plates for culinary competitions or as centerpieces. The food is coated in a very thin layer of aspic jelly, which is edible, but gives everything a pretty shine.
- Ditto bakeries that have display cakes, which generaly consists of frosted Styrofoam. For example, if you watch Ace Of Cakes on the Food Network, you'll see them cutting foam for display-only cakes sometimes (but most of their creations are actual cake).
- In a interesting case of fake food intersecting with real food, shady merchants in China (or anywhere else with lax food inspection) are known to soak yellow prunes in urine to make them more shiny and colourful, replace ethanol in liquor with the cheaper methanol (which can blind and kill you), or to make youtiao (s sort of deep fried breadstick) in a oil/washing detergent mixture, the detergent will make gas bubbles in the bread, making it look more substantial than it is.
- The current stereotype of the Chinese food industry here in Canada is "we don't care if we kill you slowly and with great pain as long as we can make five cents off you today".
