Food that looks better on commercial

I hate when i see a burger on a commercial and it looks good the when i order it its all soggy and smashed or it smaller than on the ad. I found a website than compares the ad with the real life food. http://www.thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm

It's interesting what food stylists do to make food look appetizing for print and tv. Here's another product that looks nothing like it's ad: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/consumerist/full/~3/KhE7VQV7EUg/kfcs-mashed-potato-bowl-picture-vs-reality

(Consumerist FTW!)

Anyway, food stylists have been known to even replace real food with concoctions they created in order to get the best quality, for example, making a mixture of solid shortening, corn syrup, and powdered sugar that can be scooped to simulate real ice cream that way it doesn't melt right away. And that's just one thing-it get's even more outlandish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_stylist#Styling_techniques 

I remember going to Costco once with my friend, Nancy, who used to be a food stylist.  We were in one of the freezer sections, and she said, "Oh! There's my chicken shot!"  I swear to you, it was a bag of frozen (probably Foster Farms) chicken, but they cook it and style it on the label. 

I was happy for her, though. 

The kind of food I prefer is slop (lasagne, jambalaya, pea soup, chili, etc.) and it looks like it.  So, for those foods to be made "attractive" would kind of be an oxymoron.

If you ever visit Japan, many (most?) of the restaurants have a glass display right next to the front door, where you can view it from the sidewalk. Inside are recreations of the food that you can order. It is generally made from epoxy resin, hard as a rock, but the way it is dyed, textured, and arranged on plates, you would swear it was real!

However, the difference to the advertised food that is the subject of this thread, is that the display case fakes in Japan are very often difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Side by side, you have to look for things like steam rising, food juices slowly seeping, things like that, not counting trying to stick chopsticks or a fork into it!

Big Momma wrote: I worked at Wendy's for a time when I was younger. I got "spoken to" for taking the time to make the burgers pretty, like in the ads, my boss informed me that the trucker out there doesn't care if his sandwich looks good! I'm an artist, the sandwich station was my palliate! I got over it and was forced to slap them together and throw them out the window............ oh well.

I went into my local Wendy's a few days ago, at the inside counter rather than the drive thru, and as there were no other customers, I asked them if they could build me a burger that looked like the huge poster on the wall? They treated it as a challenge, and built a burger that came pretty darned close! I was rather surprised by the result. Seems that they can make them more attractive when they have the time, and can pick and choose the lettuce and other ingredients for best effect.

Of course, it tasted the same as a slapped together sandwich, but it sure looked nice!

Yup.

Yutolia wrote: Wow, that KFC Bowl (or whatever it really is...) gives me more reason to never go there... and I didn't actually need anymore reasons to not go to KFC!  Thor, I too prefer slop... but really that's only when I or someone else that I actually know makes the slop (so that way I know exactly what's in it).

How many chickens did they have to kill for that?

This is exactly the case with Kentucky Grilled Chicken.    I've seen several commercials for it as well as two buckets of it on the announcer table on Monday Night RAW a few weeks back so  I decided to try it.   Big mistake.   It was horrible.   So dry and shriveled up.   Nothing like the golden brown grilled chicken with the perfect grill lines in the commercial.    

No, they grill the chicken in the back, thats not to say they are not  carcinogenic , but at our KFC the Grilled chicken is awesome but they give you SMALL-ASSED pieces for a 2-piece and when I get a bucket I get a few BIG Pieces, WTF? save the puny ones for the bucket put the bigger ones on the single servicing dumb-asses.

rickhamilton620 wrote: Anyway, food stylists have been known to even replace real food with concoctions they created in order to get the best quality, for example, making a mixture of solid shortening, corn syrup, and powdered sugar that can be scooped to simulate real ice cream that way it doesn't melt right away. And that's just one thing-it get's even more outlandish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_stylist#Styling_techniques

That's so bizarre! I've never even considered the way ice cream looks, just how it tastes!