Looks mouth-watering? It's not even food

Tasty food isn't always photogenic. Food stylists have several tricks up their sleeves to present a pleasing picture, even using stuff that only looks like real food.



• assortment of fruits lay on the table. Red, orange, yellow and green, the fruits were being peeled, diced, and sliced into a variety of shapes. Despite the gloomy atmosphere in the studio, they made for a pretty picture, or to be more precise, a great ad film. The gentleman wielding the knife was Ivan Fernandes, a food stylist, whose job is to 'dress up' food for the camera.
The way he went about it, he made cutting fruits seem like an evolved act of craftsmanship requiring great precision and skill. It was hard not to pop the fruits into your mouth.
"Ah, the spray's here," said Fernandes, taking a black bottle of Hit from a spot boy. And without a second thought, he sprayed it over the fruits. "I hate flies," he said, as the white aerosol dispersed in the air and over the food, driving the flies and my appetite away.
"I don't have to prepare food that people will eat. I have to make food that people will want to grab," said Fernandes, when asked about the difference between his 'dressing' of the food and that of a chef who too needs to make food look appetising.
This may make it seem like food stylists have the easier job. But as Shubhangi Dhaimade, a food stylist, put it, "When a chef presents food on your plate, apart from seeing it, you can smell the aromas, put the food in your mouth to savour the taste, feel the texture. But I have only the picture to stimulate all your senses. You should be driven to buy (the product). You should feel hungry for it."
But the pictures that have us salivating aren't always of food that is prepared according to recipes, and are often inedible. For instance, it is not possible to make a milk splash look good on TV with real milk, which is too thin. White paint is commonly used, though cream too can be used because it has the required "lushness and texture".
Similarly, shooting real ice-cream is preferable, but when client budgets are low, there is restriction in terms of the equipment and time needed to execute the shoot. In such cases, food stylists opt for the more durable option — atta mixed with the required colour, which is made to look like ice-cream.
"I can't use real jelly, which won't last under the lights (used during shoots) for more than a few hours. I make a jelly that will last for four days and looks good in front of the camera at the same time," Fernandes said, slapping a solid block of jelly, which is anything but soft and wobbly.
It's strange how we feel cheated when we discover that the gourmet dish we saw on a billboard is not how it looks in reality, but readily accept that the transformation of hair promised by a shampoo ad is exaggerated. Perhaps, we relate to food at a more basic level than beauty products.
Food stylists are aware that they walk a thin line. But to what extent can the picture be different from the real thing? According to Dhaimade, who takes up many food packaging projects, a stylist needs to have the skill to present a picture that is pleasing and yet something isn't drastically different from the final product. Otherwise consumers will feel cheated and won't buy the product again.
Another key criterion that food stylists have to meet is the client's brief, say food styling duo Saba and Sadiq Gaziyani. "When you go to a pav bhaji stall, all the veggies are mashed. But when a client wants to photograph pav bhaji, he wants the ingredients such as peas, potatoes and cauliflower to stand out," says Sadiq.
A biryani that is cooked in the layered way as prescribed in the traditional recipe will have us licking our plates clean, but is far from photogenic. "The rice, masala, and the meats or veggies are cooked separately. I combine them in the plate and every grain of rice you see on the top is individually placed by hand."

But Saba says that it is a misconception that all food stylists do is cheat. In the KFC TV commercial, Sri Lankan offie Muttiah Muralitharan kept eating the food that was being shot, she says.
"In the 14 years that we've been working in the industry, food styling has evolved. Earlier there were no freezing cans or dry ice available. Today, I use a freezing can to keep the ice-cream frozen for 10 minutes. If an equipment is unavailable, I can order it from abroad. This is allowing us to go close to the real thing," says Saba.

Then there are the experiments that food stylists carry out in the kitchen. For instance, earlier, pooris were cut open from one side and stuffed with cotton to produce the fluffy appearance. But by making the dough differently and frying it at different temperatures, stylists have come up with fluffy-for-an-entire-day pooris. But details on the recipe are sketchy. Well, if chefs have their secret recipes, so do the food stylists.