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SALT LAKE CITY — Sometimes the food seen in advertisements or on restaurant menus looks a little different than the food served.
An entire industry of food stylists is built around making food look good, using tweezers, glue and heat guns to attract customers’ attention.
Suzy Eaton is a food stylist. Her job is to get food ready for its close-up in advertising.
“I make everything look good,” she said. “I’ve done work for Wal-Mart, Target, Wendy’s, Subway, McDonald’s.”
Her tool box includes tweezers, pins, oils and even glues.
“The meat gets glued together. A lot of pinning so nothing falls out while you’re transporting it to the set,” she explained.
Here's one reason the food in the takeout bag might not look as nice as the photos — the burgers Eaton photographs are undercooked.
“I actually deep fried the burger to get it to the color I want, and then I threw it on the grill for just a second,” she said.
Eaton can transform a regular burger into a star. She started by carefully choosing the bun.
“I go through and see, what’s even, what works from the camera’s perspective,” she said. “I push mayonnaise toward the front. I always buy the leafy lettuce. It’s so much prettier than the shredded lettuce.”
“You never want the inside of the tomato for anything,” she continued. “It’s just a gooey mess. So, I just take it out and nobody ever knows.”
She also used a heat gun on cheese.
“You don’t need to overmelt it — when it starts dripping, that’s the worst. (Melt it) just enough so it folds over,” she said.
To make the burger look even fresher, Eaton brushes glycerin onto the tomato. “Make little droplets of water all around the tomato,” she explained.
Next, how does professional food photographer Amy Herold make the food look so good?
“I see everything in shapes and colors, and look for ways to create spectacular highlights,” she said.
Herold will do some slight touch-ups in Photoshop to smooth out some imperfections.
“I’ll go in and do some things we used to do in the darkroom, dodge and burn, enhance some things, pull back on others,” she said.
Do all these tricks amount to deceptive advertising?
“I hear that all the time, that everything is fake. Really, most of it is real.” - Suzy Eaton, food stylist
“I hear that all the time,” Eaton said, “that everything is fake. Really, most of it is real.”
Eaton said her clients are concerned about legal issues. Passing off fake food as real is false advertising. She said she uses real ingredients from her client’s product, but arranges them so they'll catch the public’s eye.
That's another reason why the food we see, isn't exactly what we get.
“I think they have issues on the restaurant side, and their employees, how they’re putting things together. Things are off center. That’s something they need to address within their restaurants,” she said.
