Giada's Evil Talent

This is probably a given, but I love cooking shows. I can watch almost any one of them, but for some I have to learn to ignore certain aspects. Giada de Laurentiis's shows happen to be a few of these shows. Of course I do love her shows, the recipes are delicious. Its the food stylists that drive me crazy and Giada was a food stylist before she became a food star.

It never use to bother me because I never paid it any attention. Perfection is not my goal and I also know what goes into food perfection. It came to my attention on Thanksgiving when I was discussing these shows with my god brother, Luis. He wants perfection when it comes to making food for people other than himself and sadly sometimes even himself. Now even foodies don't even know what goes into this "perfection" process. Just remember that your food will NEVER look the same as a magazine or food show. That picture is just a selling point to get you to buy what they're selling. Now there are reasons for this, some understandable and some just odd.

Reason 1
If it doesn't look desirable no one is going to want to make it or buy it. This one easy to prove, most people will already understand. Just take fast food commercials. Who honestly has had something that tastes as good as the food on its commercial looks? It looks so delicious on that commercial that as much as you know its bad for you, it just drives you to get it anyway and then you get disappointed because what you really wanted is not what you really got. You can also take oatmeal, that bland hot cereal that when actually paired with the right ingredients can taste rather delicious. As much as it might taste well, it will never look good. I mean have you ever seen a commercial for oatmeal that is all about the oatmeal and how it looks? Not me, the ones I always see focus in on the family and lifestyle.

Reason 2
Its not fully cooked. Those steaks, yeah they are quite a bit rarer than you want. It all looks like its cooked, but food looks best right before its done. This is used more with vegtables thankfully. See if you cook most vegetables till they are tender and moist and juicy, they loose a good bit of their vibrant coloring, it doesn't look as appealing. Now with items like meatballs this is also a really good technique for food stylists. A delicious meatball to me, will form a bit of a crust from the fat, but it tends to almost look like you burnt the meatball, it tastes a lot better than it looks.

Reason 3
Most of it is real food, then there are some things that just don't work real. Hence that ice cream you see, its really just a combination of shortening, corn syrup, and powdered sugar. This mixture when scooped makes the same exact cracking as real ice cream, without the melting part. Other than that food stylists would probably be sitting in a freezer to get those ice cream images. They also tend to add extra coloring to foods making them more vibrant and fresh. Speaking of fresh remember that almost everytime you see a vegetable or fruit its misted with water or even shined to look more appetizing. Natural ingriedients definatly don't look that perfect.

Reason 4
Airbrushing is no longer just for models. I'm not going to say this reason for just food, but everything. Every picture in a magazine is airbrushed. Every piece of film, other than the news, is digitally editted. There is no reason people should ever aim for perfection from these. That is all on this reason I even care to go into.

Reason 5
Your ingredients will never look the same or even perfect. Ok thats kind of wrong, because with all these advances on making plants and animals grow quicker our produce is looking more and more alike. In an ideal economy I would only buy from the farmers market and the organic section, because well I don't have to worry about adverse effects. Either way our ingredients still have some diffrence in how they look. I have yet to meet a pack of boneless, skinless chicken breasts that hold a relatively similar look. The only thing you want to be about the same in your ingredients is that your meat or cut up vegetables are about the same size so you don't have a bunch of diffrent cooking times for the same thing.

All that said perfection is not in how the food looks. Its all in the effort you put in making a meal for the people you care about. Who cares what it looks like if it tastes amazing? Its the reason I don't let people see the food before they smell it, more often than not it smells amazingly better than it looks.

Your dedicated foodie,

Zeni