Home-cooked pasta never seems to ooze steamy cheese quite as seductively as the dishes on TV commercials, but we don't blame our cooking skills. As the New York Times reveals in its behind-the-scenes look at the making of commercials for chain restaurants, picture-perfect fettuccine Alfredo calls for sauce injectors, tubes and a set of large hypodermic needles.
What else aren't they showing us?
You might know about food styling tricks like using expensive acrylic cubes instead of real ice, or keeping mozzarella melted and stretchy with an industrial hair dryer, but this article delves even deeper into the niche world of food styling for chain restaurant commercials. One director in particular, Elbert Budin, revolutionized the way commercials depict food on TV. Before he entered the industry in the 1970s, advertisements featured static shots of the product.
And it is from Mr. Elbert that we get one of the lasting visual tropes of American advertising: flying food. Ever since he launched an orange through a thin sheet of water for Sunkist — showing in gorgeous slow motion the hole left by the fruit — everything that you can put in your mouth and store in a pantry has been hurtling through the air.
Doesn't that make you think back on all the commercials you've seen of food flying through the air? And aren't you now wondering why you never thought to ask yourself, "Why is that _____ flying through the air?"
Read the article for more fascinating facts about this industry, including how one crew managed to make a dish called "pizza pasta" look appetizing. (Hint: it's all about the cheese pull.)
• Check it out: Grilled Chicken, That Temperamental Star at the New York Times
Related: The Help: Real Southern Food on Film
(Image: fotohavran.eu/Shutterstock)
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Well, this is really interesting. As expats living in the Midwest for 2 years, we found the food on tv particularly revolting. We, born and breed in the south of South America, couldn't understand why anyone would want to ruin a perfectly good piece of grilled meat with a disgusting looking "barbecue sauce". In pictures and video, we found the food suspiciously shiny and colorful, and not really attractive.
I guess there's a lot of cultural sensibility in the mix, too, don't you think?
Trust me - you're not alone. I was born & raised in NY, lived for years on the West Coast and now I'm in the Midwest... it's not you, it's the shiny, greasy, sugar-slicked-overstyled food. And it looks revolting to me, too. Honestly, I don't need everything to be "crunchy".
Julia and Keltrue, I agree! The food in most commercials does NOTHING to make me want it. The more "perfect" something is presented, the more artificial coloring, stabilizers, gums, etc... I assume it contains. The chain restaurant commercials are especially bad.
Wow, I come back after months to check the replies...! Thank you for them and it's great to see common sense is still alive!!!
(Or, in other words, you cannot really trust everything they tell you. But you should know that by now, don't you?)