We live in challenging times. Our Taoiseach wears make-up and has forsaken his anorak for a suit, Fine Gael has completely updated its election campaign, unsigned pop bands worry more about their wardrobe allowance than their recording advance and women get given birthday presents of cosmetic surgery. Presentation has been the defining factor of the decade. Remember Michael Douglas's reaction to the hot dog he ordered in Falling Down? This "false advertising" or embalming to appetise, is the food stylist's job description. Just as the clothes in glossy magazines will never look like that on real human beings, it is equally likely that the supermarket food you select because of its appealing/appetising packaging will look very different in the light of your kitchen. In short, it's lying for a living.
Food stylist Sally Dunne began working for her father, Kevin Dunne, as a photographer's assistant. Always interested in food, she did the three-month cookery course in Ballymaloe, followed by two years with Johnny Cooke before acting on her father's advice and becoming a food stylist. It's totally different preparing food for a camera. The product has to withstand studio lights, its colours can go off in a short space of time. "Things like ice cream and chickens are really difficult, they're all painted and made-up." The real thing just wouldn't last in studio, nor would it look very appetising.
To increase a roast chicken's appeal, Sally would begin by stuffing the bird, as you would a normal chicken - this does for the chicken what the uplift bra does for women's breasts, creating instant lift and making the meat look more appetising. The chicken is then cooked for a certain amount of time, to further plump her up. Further indignation awaits the bird as she is then painted with Sally's own secret mix of food dyes or airbrush paints - a fake tan for chickens, if you will. This tint is blended with a clear shampoo to ensure that the solution sticks to the bird's fatty, oily skin. Once tinted, padded and trussed up, she becomes a player in the illusion game, the fowl equivalent of Pamela Anderson.
Turkeys, chickens and big slabs of meat are the most difficult things to style. The bones in roasts tend to discolour with cooking, sometimes they need to be re-touched to authenticate the look. "Boiled ham tends to explode out in different places. You Superglue the seams before you start. Even with chickens, their skins would be Superglued into position before you bake them, so they keep their shape."
Each job is a new, unique experience. "I could have my formula ready and this particular chicken just won't take the mix, there'll be fatty patches, or bruises on her that will show up. From the very beginning you should pick everything yourself."
Sally once fried 96 eggs to get the perfect shot. Imagine standing over a frying pan, eliminating the ones with small bits of blood in them, the ones where the yolk isn't in the right place, all the eggs whose edges have gone too dark or which have bubbles coming up through the white? When you do get the "perfect egg", you glaze it with oil and quickly capture the moment on film. Oil is the food stylist's secret weapon, it makes cold meat look instantly "hot and roasty".
Real ice-cream is another nightmare. Beingcamera shy, it melts instantly under the lights. So Sally improvises, using a sugar and syrup confection to create the same texture as ice-cream, adding dyes to reproduce the exact colour. The illusion gets a further injection of reality by enriching the compound with essential ice cream ingredients, such as macadamia nuts. This blend can take days to get right. The counterfeit ice-cream is then brushed with the genuine article to boost the effect.
Her worst job to date has been a lasagne. "Its such a messy looking thing at the best of times. It takes hours. I spent twelve hours on one slice of lasagne, sticking it to cardboard, half cooking it, using pins to keep the pasta in place." In the end she cheated, stealing a strip from the back of the slice and adding it into the meat to plump up the layers so that it appeared to be oozing content. The end result looked succulent - even if it did take 12 hours with no lunch break.
The occupational hazards are many. You need oodles of patience and the ability to think laterally. Sally never leaves home without her bag of tricks, which contains tweezers and loads of syringes (for adding ketchup and mayonnaise to hamburgers, injecting it into the right spots for the client), a couple of different sized spritzers loads of scalpels, sharp knives and, of course, the food stylist's essential, the aforementioned Superglue.
The potential for wastage on jobs is huge, and she gives all left-overs to the Women's Refuge in Rathmines. Next time you're in the freezer section of your local supermarket or salivating over a cookbook, spare a thought for the food stylist who presented the food so appetisingly that you couldn't resist buying it. Don't, however, work yourself into a lather when your chicken looks nothing like the one in the picture. Food is not, despite genetic and stylistic interference, generic.
