Food Stylists Sell Lies

The false promise of perfect-looking food through advertisements

As a full-time food stylist, I get to play with food professionally. It’s fun but I have a problem with it. I work for a massive food-tech corporation, I believe food styling and intense photo-editing are intertwined with what I think is a deep social issue.

The concept alone is pretty wild. You make food look more appealing. Aren’t we human enough to find food appealing without manipulating its natural look? I guess not… Making food look nice is beautiful, we eat with our eyes, after all. But to use motor oil as syrup on pancakes or glue for the stringy cheese effect on pizza is madness and false advertising. You would lose your appetite if you knew more food styling tricks. Luckily, where I work we don’t use any of those stomach-turning tricks because we eat the food after.

Food styling can be artistic, inspiring, sensual, and appetizing. But the food styling I’m talking about is the corporate kind, the manipulative kind on food packaging and advertisements. Food packaging and advertisements that make food look so fake and unreal, somehow raise the value.

Disguising food that is poor in nutrition is a brand marketing team specialty. You use photo-editing skills, a food stylist, good branding, and cool packaging. Our food system and supply are already on shaky ground, and our trust in food companies is dwindling. Reading the ingredient list is our reassurance policy on their attempt at trying to sell you their food. A heavily exaggerated food picture helps with that sale because it can quickly convince your perception and gain your trust.

I would compare food styling to fashion. Instead of dressing up a model with a brand’s product or clothes, you dress up food to sell as the product. A model must look flawless wearing the brand’s product, and in turn, the product almost becomes secondary — the sales point changes depending on who is wearing it.

You might be convinced to buy the product. It can make you feel so fresh and so clean for a moment, but it probably won’t look the same on you. That is because you got visually played. The battalion of corporate creatives did their job, they’ve convinced you to buy. You got got.

The same can be said about who or what company sells your food. You would trust some companies over others because you seem to trust their branding. The power of branding is a market in itself, green logos to seem organic and fresh, pictures of nature or farms, and so on.

We seem to be fooled the same way with food. We need to understand our connection and relationship with food again. We think it magically arrives in our supermarkets looking flawless, the picture on the packaging looks sublime. You open the package to discover something that looks like a raccoon thrashed it around, proving the visual lie. Supermarkets avoid buying ugly fruits and vegetables because, as consumers, we probably won’t buy them. A deformed vegetable is not going anywhere, it won’t sell. What’s wrong with us? Are we so used to picture-perfect food we tell ourselves something must be wrong? We are spoiled with aesthetic food.

Photoshop skills are used to mask what food should look like. We transform the natural and pump up the colors to make it look more appealing. We are visually fooled into believing this is reality. Every picture of food you see in supermarkets, advertisements, or food corporations is tampered with.

Give me the ugly. I’m tired of the blatant visual lies and false marketing. We need the ugly to keep in touch with reality. Why is it being portrayed as perfect, why are the visual lies normalized?

Flashlights and Photoshop are mandatory before making the sale of any product. Mix that with a low production cost, or which is most convenient and you are on your way to becoming a ‘successful’ company. I am wary of cheap conveniences because I believe if it is cheap; something or someone else is paying for it.

Food styling can be an art. Just like any art form, it can be weaponized to be commercialized. That is what I have a problem with. Food stylists can help sell an idea through pictures or videos. The idea is that what you are buying is perfect and flawless. We are dressing up the fake and we are good at it.

We wouldn't accept doctored images from the media, digital manipulation under those circumstances is unacceptable. Altered food adverts aren’t necessarily misinformation, but we accept the major changes that affect our perception and sway us into being manipulated into buying, even if it’s just for a second. We’re getting played on the daily.

Those perfect pictures in adverts show what you can get if you just consume a little more — the bottom line is to convince you to buy.

How contradictory of me as a food stylist to ask to leave my food alone.

What do you think?

Cheeseburger-ly yours,

The Greasy Pen.

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Next Sunday, I’ll take a small one-week break from The Greasy Pen newsletter. I’ll be in Venice, Italy drinking wine and eating well with my family. I’ll try to bring you a souvenir!