FOOD PHOTO SHOOT

By Janice Daugharty

I’m a reader. No, not an avid reader. That term has been taken over by readers who feast from the New York Times top-ten list. Avid readers read self-help and popular fiction, fluff whipped up from cliches. Makes you kind of wonder why they don’t just watch TV. Still, they have their favorite authors, same as I do. I’ve blistered my eyes reading Cormac McCarthy, E. Annie Proulx, Louise Erdrich, Ian McEwan and other fine writers of serious fiction. Faulkner started this craving I have for the fresh and exact. So, because of this over-indulgence of mine, I’ve developed a bad case of eyestrain, meaning my weekly reading of The New Yorker has been put on hold till my subscription runs out.

Like a child now, I’m looking at pictures in magazines and catalogues. For a while I looked at fashion catalogues, then I got tired of clothes that only Kate Moss could wear. After that, I started looking at celebrity magazines, all those dewy young beauties, hoping to inspire myself to diet and exercise; I might even summon up the courage to have my ears cut loose and laid back for the skin on my face to be tugged, tucked and stitched to my ears again. Most of these pictures were of sloppily-dressed stars appearing shocked and annoyed by the cameras, though caught in the act of posing for just such accidental publicity shots. And, hey, since when did pregnant women start showing off their naked pop-bellies? As for those perfect, perturbed faces...well, everybody knows they are digitally enhanced.

Finally, starved for something with meat, during this rest from reading, I started looking at pictures of food, and not only in cookbooks. I would read the recipes later. For now I would have to make do with pictures of shrimp and pasta dishes, sprinkled with chips of green and red—maybe peppers. I’m pretty sure this one dish was topped with shavings of parmesan and dashed with herbs. I would have to make do with pictures of grilled trout wrapped with bundles of dill and fennel sprigs. I know there is a secret herein to keep the trout from sticking when you turn them, a secret to prevent them from ending up scrambled and falling through the grill slots. I would have to make do with pictures of berries and fruits—my favorite, a berry salad composed of sliced strawberries and whole blueberries, tossed with diced pecans and basil.
But actually it was one plump, golden roasted chicken—glazed with what?—that finally broke me down and made me read the tiny blue print on a background of lemon yellow.

Whoa! This isn’t a recipe at all. It’s about a food photo shoot and how this stylist named Martha-not-Stewart makes this plump golden roasted chicken look so enticing. Here’s what I read: “One of the biggest challenges the stylist faces is creating food that looks appropriately steaming hot or crisply cold, when, in fact, it is most often at room temperature. According to Martha, ‘Almost every job presents new challenges, and I’ve had to develop MacGyver-like skills to solve them. For instance, to create yummy-looking poultry, a stylist will only semi-cook the bird and then paint it with a combination of butter, natural food pigments and soap to get the perfect, golden delicious appearance.’ Needless to say,” the article goes on to say, “the food from a photo shoot is never consumed.”

So, here we have a salmonella-tainted chicken guaranteed to give you phosphate poisoning. The berries in that salad recipe are probably shellacked to make them glisten.

Not only are the fashion and celeb pictures fake but the food is too.
I think I’ll just lie here in my porch swing and listen to the trusty twittering of birds and buzzing of locusts. I might fall asleep and dream I’m reading The New Yorker.