Have we ever thought about the food photographs we see in magazines and commercials and considered whether they are fake or not? Well, the food industry knows that we can easily buy something if it’s beautiful and appealing and they try to manipulate our weakness.
Firstly, they use fake materials in the majority of food commercials. Let me give you some examples. When they want to create the steam that comes off a food, they use cotton because the cotton has the ability to emit steam when it gets hot. They hide the cotton under the food because it seems delicious when it’s hot.
The advertisers use deodorants and sprays for hair to make the fruits and the vegetables look fresh and cool before taking the photographs. This is because the image causes consumers to buy something more easily.
Another example is that real ice cream can’t remain frozen under hot lights. As a result, the advertisers must find something else to replace the ice cream and what’s better than mashed potatoes? Mashed potatoes really resemble ice cream and they can easily take the shape of ice cream.
In addition, we must admit that the cereals we eat in the morning for breakfast are not like the ones on the box or in the commercial. If the advertisers used real milk to make the commercial, the cereals wouldn’t have bright colors and a nice shape because milk softens the cereals and they wouldn’t be beautiful in a photograph. So they use glue to make cereals stay firm. Glue makes the cereals look fresh and tasty.
Numerous advertisements and brochures for burgers attract our attention and make us buy them. This is because the bread looks well-baked but it’s also fake. To make the bread look so brown and tasty they use polish for shoes and especially the color brown.
Moreover, the ice cubes that are contained in drinks in some commercials are just cubes of plastic. How can real ice cubes not melt after so many photographs with blinding lights? After many hours out of the fridge, the ice cubes would have become a small lake.
Two delicious meals are a stuffed chicken and pancakes. In the magazine photographs the chicken is stuffed with paper and the pancakes don’t have honey but oil for cars. The automotive oil is more suitable because honey makes the pancakes really soft. Furthermore, the advertisers use red lipstick to make strawberries more attractive to our eyes.
Before a commercial for milk, they add detergent for clothes to make the milk look fresher and full of bubbles. Last but not least, when they want to take a photograph of a cake they use paper between the layers of the cake to protect it from dissolution. Really creative!
It’s so easy for the advertisers to sell something with these techniques but we must be aware that the commercial is not exactly the product we are going to buy. It’s so easy for them to make us want something even if we don’t really need it.
Catherine Lakafosi
