Yes, I know. You’ve restated my point at length.
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And with some interesting details that I thought other people might like to know about. Is this a problem?
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Yup.
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The specific focus on portion size seems pretty non-frivolous to me.
The overall genre of ‘food microwaved by harried service workers doesn’t look as nice as food models carefully put together by prop experts under studio lighting’ is distasteful but on the vague side.
“The product pictured has twice as much meat in it as the produce received” seems like a much more concrete and immediately economically relevant sort of misrepresentation. Especially when restaurant menus typically don’t provide an actual weights-and-measures specification of the product the way packaged foods do. Sure, the picture on the cereal box is ‘enlarged to show texture’, definitely not to make it look more abundant; but the package does tell you that there are 500 grams in there. On a Taco Bell menu it looks like you do get approximate calorie counts, but no weights; so the picture is the representation of the product.
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As @Tamsin_Bailey noted - if you just wanted to add to the points that @VeronicaConnor was making, you could have done so in a way that did not make it seem like you were explaining her own points she just made to her…
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Yah, you may be right about this. As has been said upthread, this is probably technically legal currently because no doubt what they did is push all the meat to the front and prop up the back with toothpicks or marbles or whatever. But looking at the resulting photo, that is clearly actively misleading. It’s a pretty extreme example that does seem to cross a line of common sense.
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Yeah that movie and Fight Club are two movies that as a college kid in the late 90s I was like “Yeah that was a fun watch with some amusing ideas to stick it to the man”.
Now in my 40s seeing “all this”… I finally get that it and also thank goodness I was born too early to get sucked into radicalized angry white dude internet.
That aside, and back on topic, I wish this man luck on his quest to actually fight against Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and K Street, I doubt it’s gonna go far. Also, all that aside, I enjoy Taco Bell but I have no illusions.
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That was extremely helpful and educational. Thank you!
(Seriously I literally only knew like 5% of that going in.)
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A lot of white dudes of all ages are under the mistaken impression that Michael Douglas was playing the hero in many of those movie roles from the '80s and '90s, when in fact he was always playing a selfish, entitled arsehole.
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Why’s it so difficult to determine what’s common sense? It’s supposed to be “common”. It’s right there in the name!
Maybe it’s like trying to build something idiot proof, 'cause there’s always better idiots coming along. I’m probably paraphrasing someone.
I blame lawyers.
I would be surprised if Taco Bell were violating any of the requirements you described by using outright different quantities for the food stylists (though it would be interesting to know how widely quantities vary between a Taco Bell Corporate HQ-spec portion size and what a taco tech who has been given some verbal reprimands to the effect that team players don’t use that much filling by a margin-conscious franchisee or branch manager might in practice be using.)
It just seems like the particular, and fairly dramatic, emphasis on making the quantity look significantly different crosses a line in a way that a more generic making the food look great doesn’t.
Roughly analogous to the fact that I wouldn’t feel cheated in any legally actionable sort of way if I ordered some clothing and discovered that it really does look better on someone handpicked for handsome, in great shape, and 20 years younger than me, with impeccable makeup and lighting; but I would if I ordered some clothing and discovered that it looked like a wearable size because the model was about 4’11" and clever perspective and camera work was used to make them look substantially larger so that a child-size amount of fabric could be represented as an adult sized garment.
(edit: or, in a more culinary context, the chicanery made possible by the fact that there are glasses of several sizes that are technically “pint glasses” somewhere; along with plenty more that are of roughly the expected shape and indeterminate volume: you don’t have much to go on just because the pint in the ad has an absolutely impeccable head and luscious condensation drops in ways yours does not; but you’d have a much more obvious weights-and-measures problem if someone in an imperial pint zone is using an American glass to make a very short interpretation of 568ml look like a very generous 473.)
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I love all the special one-off equipment that has to be designed to get the desired effect in comercials. You want your shrimp to fly twisting through the air and land on a plate perfectly? Then you need to design a clever contraption to accelerate the shrimp, impart the necessary spin, and not damage the shrimp in the process. Just the simple act of dropping the top of the burger bun onto the burger (called “crowning” in the biz) can require custom machinery that wont damage the bun or impart an undesired wobble. Add in slow motion closeups and now you need special lenses and extra lighting which has to be accounted for. It really is some clever engineering!
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About 30 years ago I got a burger at Harvey’s in Toronto that could’ve been used for a product shot.
It was tasty too.
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Yes! Much of that stuff is fascinating. The “stunt” side of food styling is super interesting. Machines that make ice tumble out of a coke glass “just so”, or making oranges collide in midair and turn into juice, that sort of thing.
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So how does using Elmers glue instead of milk (which I was always under the impression was done because milk looks blue on film) jive with “Food Stylists only use the actual food In commercials because laws?”
I used to have a disturbingly realistic 2X size plastic Pizza Hut pizza (I’ve forgotten how I came to posses it, this would have been in the late 80’s) that I was told was used for the shots where the camera glides over the surface of the “hot, gooey” pizza. Absolutely nothing remotely edible about it. Why would this thing exist if not to be photographed up close with fake “steam” for a commercial?
They don’t use glue instead of milk, they add glue to the milk. This is not because of colour (which would be trivial to correct in post) it’s because that gives the droplets a nicer shape in high speed photography of splashes and such. Again, legal because it is the real food product being photographed, they’ve just added something to it.
Well, that would be heresy, so I can’t speak to that.
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Oh yeah. What’s funny is if you ask me about Wall Street I’d hands down be like “Yep, Gordon Gekko is an asshole.” even back then and I was in the minority.
But yeah, for some reason it took a while in some of his other roles.
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I appreciated the extra details you added about picking out chocolate chips, or adding marbles to Campbell’s soup. I wouldn’t have thought about people doing that, but of course it makes sense, and I expect I’ll notice that kind of deception more next time I see a food add.
I also appreciate the info @VeronicaConnor originally gave.
Thank you both for giving me a fuller picture of food photography.
To add to that, it helps that they’re not selling the milk, they’re selling the cereal. You’re allowed to get away with a bit more if you’re adulterating something generic, not the product you’re selling.
