| rdfs:comment
| - Food seen in commercials has often been improved for the purpose of shooting the commercial. Lettuce will always be crisp, hamburger buns perfect and full, cake light and fluffy. Ice cream is never melting, unless that was the point. As good as the food may be made to look, however, actually eating that specific example is probably hazardous to your health. For starters, the food may have been coated in shellac to ensure that it stays looking good no matter how many takes are done. This is somewhat reasonable, as heat from any lamps being used can cause things to wilt.
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| abstract
| - Food seen in commercials has often been improved for the purpose of shooting the commercial. Lettuce will always be crisp, hamburger buns perfect and full, cake light and fluffy. Ice cream is never melting, unless that was the point. As good as the food may be made to look, however, actually eating that specific example is probably hazardous to your health. For starters, the food may have been coated in shellac to ensure that it stays looking good no matter how many takes are done. This is somewhat reasonable, as heat from any lamps being used can cause things to wilt. If the food comes in standard proportions, they may have to keep those proportions due to Truth in Advertising laws... but they can still engage in trickery. Arrange the items on the plate so that (at the angle chosen for the shot), where the view is blocked by other food, there's nothing behind it - but people won't realise that! Cut a wedge out of the hamburger patty, so you can spread it out a bit, making it look wider (this one's almost universal in fast food advertisements). Use camera angles and zooms that make it look larger than it actually is - essentially, the Hitler Cam as applied to food. And you can always just put those standard proportions on a really small plate. For a good example of the last of those tricks, watch a Dairy Queen ad for their Peanut Buster Parfait and compare how large it appears with what you actually get in the restaurant. You will notice that you rarely see an actor's hands in the picture to give you a sense of scale. The items used for photo layouts and "beauty shots" are often not even edible. Ice cream sundaes are often constructed of scoops of lard or mashed potato covered in motor oil, or other toxic-yet-pretty trickery. Likewise, "steam" rising from "hot" food is often smoke from a hidden cigarette, and ice cubes will really be deftly sculpted chunks of acrylic. Note that, in general, truth in advertising laws require that the product being advertised should be the same as the one shown (though some of the tricks described above are still applicable), so, for example in a commercial for chocolate syrup, the syrup will be real, but the ice cream onto which is is poured is just as likely to be made of plasticine. The cereal shown in the bowl is, indeed, the product, but the pouring stream of milk is almost always watered down glue. Examples of Fake Food include:
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