Fast Food: Advertised vs Reality

Interesting! I've worked in advertising for a long time, and I've seen the food stylists stuff calzones with paper towels before baking them so they look perfectly rounded for the cameras, and them adding salt to beers to keep the head foamy. The thought of a baked paper towel still makes my skin crawl.

Interesting pictures, but I have to wonder about the person who undertook this project. I mean, is it really all that shocking that advertisements do not really portray real life accurately?

I think it resembles the Whiskas cat food even more. I wish I had a picture of their "in gravy" pouch food. It looks just like that.

Someone should go after these advertisers for truth in advertising or something. The pictures they show on the ads are ridiculous. Everyone know the food ends up looksing like crap when you get it.

I've actually complained to places when my food didn't look like the picture on the menu. It never does any good.

I'll never forget watching a segment on 60 Minutes years ago on this topic. They showed a picture of a beautiful bowl of ice cream...then showed how they shot the picture by scooping 3 scoops of pure lard into a bowl and covering with chocolate syrup, etc.

It was nasty!

Brian

You're kidding me, right? The people who make and give you the food have nothing to do with the pictures and ads. You might as well complain to your bus driver about the US highway systems. That makes no sense.

Roy Gerbil said:
I've actually complained to places when my food didn't look like the picture on the menu. It never does any good.[...]

I think it wouldn't do any good to complain about it. We all know how true it is and we still have the choice to eat there. It would be our fault if we fall for their nice pictures again.

i'm not in the least bit surprised or shocked about this. in fact i'm more surprised that this is made out to be some kind of "expose" and that people are having such a reaction to it. i've known since i was about 12 that the way fast food looks on tv, is not the way it looks when you get it. my brother and i always used to joke that a McD's burger looked like a burger on tv but in real life it looked like a sandwhich because it was so flat instead of the big fat thing that was advertised.

maybe it's interesting to actually have some photos of the difference between the fast food on tv and that in real life but i would have thought people have known for a long while about this. imo, the fast food industry dont need to be held accountable for whatever. call it false advertising if you want but if you are the type of person to buy fast food, you most likely know it never looks the way it does on tv. neither does the picture on the box of the food you are about to make, some healthy food looks different on tv than it does in real life etc. i say if you want to call out the fast food industry for false advertising, then do it for everybody else because at the end of the day they are all tricking you. it is down to you whether you "fall" for it and buy the product on tv.

i have more of an issue with sugary cereals and other unhealthy food targeted towards children and advertisied during cartoons, happy meals and the way the "healthy" tag is branded on some foods that really are not. no one is going to show you how a burger really truely looks in an ad because it wont sell the burger as well, lets be honest. i'd rather they stop putting those ads on tv all together rather than show the disgusting crap that is that kfc meal in this post. and i have to wonder that if the fast food industry were made to show how they meals really looked when served to customers if they'd just stop advertising on tv and come up with another inventive way to advertise or if they'd be sneaky and find some loophole out of it. in a nut shell, fast food advertising is unlikely to die any time soon because it generates so much money and the world's government's are unlikely to put an end to them because of that simple fact unless there is some mass uproar which in today's society is very very unlikely indeed.

I'm not shocked by the photographs at all. We all know how advertising works...think about the hours that models spend in hair and make up before they do a photoshoot. And just like when you strip some models of their hair and make up you're left with an empty, shallow person, when you strip fast food of it's stuffing and gloss you're left with empty calories. On the other hand, many models, dressed up or not are deep, loving, wonderful people and same goes for healthy food. Whether it looks good or not will never change the value of all the nutrients inside. Didn't we all learn a long time ago, not to judge a book by it's cover?

It's hard to believe anyone would be surprised that "real" Fast Food doesn't look like its advertised pictures. Has anyone ever baked a cake? Did your result look like the picture on the cake mix box? Hardly.

Advertising for ALL food products are created by professional food stylists. I used to work for a film studio that produced TV commercials and often watched the food stylists with great fascination. They use every trick in the book to get the food to look tempting, and that does include, yes ... stuffing things with paper towels. They also pour salt and sugar over things then brush them with oil to get them to glisten. The ice cream you see in ads is rarely real ice cream because that would melt under the photographic lights. The ice you see in cold drinks is rarely ice for that same reason.

It's naive to think that a burger flipper at McD's should create something that looks identical to what's been made by people whose entire job is to make food look pretty ... like a makeup artist to a model.

Even healthy foods have food stylists they use to make their food look more appetizing. Look at a box of Amy's Pot Pies. Does the product actually look as pretty as the picture on the box? Does that Boca burger you just make look at pretty as the one on that box? Probably not.

If the food in the photo were ugly, it wouldn't sell the food. That's the bottom line whether it's fast food, healthy food or whatever it is being advertised.

I work in the food production industry and we have to routinely photograph our products after we cook them to do quality control. In the realm of food photography, there are laws saying that when you advertise food, the actual product that you are selling must be in the picture, but it says nothing about what you can add to it to enhance it. Say you're selling cereal...the cereal has to be the actual product but the stylists often use a bowl of shortening to simulate "milk" so the cereal doesn't get soggy during a shoot.

Honestly, doesn't everyone pretty much know that what you see in pictures is definitely NOT what you get when you order?

Right. Everyone knows what you get at fast food joints is not what is advertised. This means a jury would be sympathetic to the false advertising lawsuit.

I don't suggest they make their food look like the pictures. I just think it should be illegal to show fake food on advertisements as if it was the real thing. In England, gaming companies (Call of Duty) got sued for showing computer generated graphics as if it was gameplay. This is much worse, as its screwing up people's health.

I guess the only reason I care is every damn gym in my area has TVs all around the cardio equipment. And half the time theres fast food commercials with the lame fake food that, despite my knowledge and cynicism, always makes me hungry. Damn subconscious!

Even if the the people who made it during the ads are different from the people serving the real food, I think they are ought to learn how to prepare it. That kind of preparation shows that they are not interested in making their customers amazed.

I remember reading in some kid's magazine as a child that advertisers squirt detergent into cocoa to make it foamy and use glue in cereal pictures. It stayed with me forever (thanks, Nickelodeon!). As a habit now, I try to guess what fake items are being used in food pictures to make them more appealing.

I think "Huh" makes a good point, too - the advertisers and the food manufacturers are completely different groups of people. And we wonder why advertising is in crisis...people now simply assume that the products aren't as good/representations of what is actually being sold. (BTW Mark Sisson blogged about that KFC food bucket in a funny post a while back: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-sisson-spoof-2/)

Of course we all know that the product we get never looks like the one that's advertised but I love seeing it side by side! THANK YOU for providing this . . . it's great! P.S. My favorite: Arby's! That's just gross!!

While I understand what most are saying, I have to disagree with most of you. I believe that the corporations paying for commercials of their food to be portrayed in unreal ways sure be held responsible when the real deal is horrible. The ads create unreal images in your head and make you crave their product. While you know that the ad is fake, it still creates a good image for the product: a false good image of the product. And people are going to want it whether or not they know it's not going to look that way. So I do blame the big cooperates like McD's for their ads and I think they should either have to show their food how it would be served or make the food look better.
My parents own a cafe and I have made various sandwiches. I know that it's hard to make the food like ad-like in a short amount of time (fast-food) but we still manage to get food out in 10-20 (rush, long orders...) min. But we do and the food looks great. I hate that fast food joints cut corners to cut 5 min. off the prep time. The end result is horrible. I bet that if people where allowed to see their food being made (start to finish) people would want to eat it. (btw my parents cafe lets you see us make the food, you can even tell we doing it wrong if you like.)
So that's my view, feel free to disagree, or question what I said, I should check but here some time. (Don't see this page getting a crazy amount of traffic tho, no offense.)
-Marcus A. :)

Look here to see some really sad false ads

http://www.funtasticus.com/20080324/advertising-vs-reality-a-product-comparison-project/