It’s commonplace for fast food joints to advertise their hamburgers with delicious-looking, ruffled green leaf lettuce…and then serve the sandwiches with pale, wilted iceberg lettuce that looks like it grew under a rock.
How do they get away with advertising one thing and then serving another, and how far can they go? Can they picture a sandwich with cheese slices but serve it with cheese sauce? Are there any rules here?
The photographs must be taken of products prepared with the actual ingredients available to the restaurant, but they’re allowed to pick and choose the best bits. So, they can use the greenest lettuce, juciest tomatoes and the like, but they couldn’t substitute cheese slices for cheese sauce, nor use plastic or wax replicas of ingredients.
I’d have no objections to photos showing impossibly green and fresh-looking iceberg lettuce, but I’m talking about completely different varieties of lettuce. Could a restaurant show a salad with mixed greens but serve it with only iceberg lettuce? Could they advertise a red delicious apple then give you a granny smith?
Forget fast food places, how about those damn frozen dinners? The cover looks like a mouth-watering feast, but when you open it up, it look slike something your dog vomitted! Whoever is in charge of arranging the food to look as good as it does on the box is an artist on the order of Michelangelo or Rembrandt.
Whaddaya want for ninety-nine cents? Chives? You’re lucky it’s cooked.
Hey, at Wendy’s you can get a baked potato with sour cream and chives for only 99 cents!
What? Well, unofficially…
Speaking of which…
Wendy’s had those so-called pitas a while back that weren’t served with pita bread at all, but with a doughy pancake wrapped around the filling. That’s like offering someone a loaf of French bread and then giving them a hot dog bun. Where, I ask where, do we draw the line between aesthetics and deception?!?
I made hundreds of those pitas in the summer of 1997. Our pitas were definitely made with pita bread.
Unless it’s ice cream.
I saw a kids’ show a while back on how food is prepared for ads. Ice cream will melt too fast under the lights, so they use vegetable shortening IIRC.
They also showed the ad-makers gluing individual sesame seeds on the hamburger bun, propping up the fries with toothpicks, and pushing all the meat and extra-fresh lettuce to the front of the bun.
There was a fuss made at one time about soup ads. Seems some soup company was filling the bottom of the bowl with marbles first so that it looked like there was more of the meat & vegetables per each amount of broth. I forget how it turned out, but one of the issues was whether they had to show an accurately representational serving, assuming that all the solids were perfectly apportioned per serving, considering that such a thing never really happens IRL.
On packaged food, you will nearly always find the words ‘Serving Suggestion’ near the photograph, meaning (I think) nothing more than “this is how you could arrange the contents of this package, even though they might not look exactly the same”, or , being cynical, “We wish it looked like this”.
I’ve actually seen an article on food advertising asthetics. Stuff like roasted chicken isn’t even roasted for the ad, just shoved under a blowtorch for a few seconds. The same goes for burgers.
Cooked outside, raw inside :eek: .
Burger King, I’m pretty sure it was, was sued some years ago for just what the OP asks about. They (BK) won, the judge saying that the photo only represented the product before wrapping, and that ingredients may change in appearance beyond the burger joint’s control.
I’ll see if I can find a cite. Hold your breath, now. 
Peace,
mangeorge
They use plastic for ice cubes and vasoline to make it look either shiney or to keep the vegtables fresh looking.
Wouldn’t that tend to melt, too? I recall reading–it may evan have been in one of the Straight Dope books–that they used mashed potatoes.
Isn’t that unnecessarily complicated? Why not just spoon in more veggies/meat without adding more of the broth? Or pour some broth out of the bowl?
If someone asked me to make a bowl of soup look thicker, I really don’t think marbles would have been the first thing to cross my mind.
I forget what the reason was. It had something to do with there already being some soup in the bowl and then they were dipping more in. It was a while back.
Professional cook here…
I have to agree with mangeorge’s comments about the BK case. I started my restaurant career in fast food, and I wrapped billions and billions of hamburgers and sandwiches. Prepared properly, the stuff really does look good - before it’s wrapped up. Wrapping the thing smashes it down a bit, and the wrapping (whether paper wrapping of little box) holds the heat in and makes things wilt.
In fast food joints, with some exceptions, your food is not prepared to order. The fully-assembled and wrapped burger you get has probably been sitting in the warmer for at least a couple minutes before it’s handed to you. It doesn’t take long for lettuce to wilt.
Greenleaf lettuce vs Iceberg - hey, iceberg lettuce is better on a burger anyway. Greenleaf usually tastes like dirt and has an unappetizing papery texture. Greenleaf just looks prettier. It’s more often used as garnish than an actualy sandwich ingredient.
Cheese slice vs cheese sauce - unless you’re at Arby’s eating a Beef & Cheddar ™, which is topped with cheddar cheese sauce, I assure you that you really are getting a slice of cheese on your burger. The problem is, it’s almost always that so-called “American Cheese” aka “pasteurized cheese product”. When American cheese is heated, it melts almost instantly. Quick melting is a highly desireably characteristic in a fast food restaurant, because it, well, makes the food faster to prepare. American cheese will melt nicely simply from the heat of the burger patty while it’s all wrapped up together. So the cook can slap the naked patty on the bun, put a slice of cheese on top, and wrap it up, knowing that the cheese will be sufficiently melted by the time the customer unwraps the burger. Real cheddar cheese, OTOH, takes much, much longer to melt. The cook actually has to place the cheese on the patty while it’s still on the grill or broiler, and then wait wait wait for it to melt. Some but not all better restaurants will often use real cheddar, because speed isn’t the most important factor there. American cheese does indeed resemble cheese sauce when it is melted.
As to the appearance of the vegetables, a lot depends upon what the individual restaurants are able to buy from their suppliers. While most chain restaurants get their meats and other signature ingredients from the chain’s designated national supplier, a lot of individual restaurants in the chain will buy their vegetables from a local supplier. So proximity to farms has a big influence on the end product. Some stores just can’t get certain things, and so have to go with a substitute. Lettuce in particular is very perishable. A restaurant far from the lettuce farms may have difficulty obtaining a specific variety that is acceptably fresh, and so will substitute a different variety that holds up better on the journey.
Er, that should have been “paper wrapping or little box”
:smack:
This encyclopedia site defines “pita bread” as “a round flat wheat bread” in which “the baked dough remains separated inside. This allows pita bread to be sliced and opened into pockets, allowing various ingredients to be stuffed inside.”
The Wendy’s “pitas” were round, doughy, pocketless discs dusted with wheat germ to make them look nutritious, even though they were, as I said earlier, white flour pancakes. Real pita bread is pocket bread, which you stuff by putting the filling inside the pocket. The Wendy’s “Fresh Stuffed Pitas,” as they were misleadingly called, were not really stuffed at all because the bread had no pocket. Instead, the bread was wrapped halfway around the filling, sort of like a big soft taco.
I have seen these Wendy’s “pitas” referred to in print as “custom pitas,” which they may be. If you consider that a pita, more power to you. But it absolutely is not “pocket bread.” The tragedy is, my local Greek restaurant started wrapping their falafels in these damned “custom pitas” after Wendy’s creation became popular.
Hey finally a thread with a subject that I actually have some knowledge of 
Right now we are working on the completion of our Dominican cookbook and I am doing the photography. Our pictures don’t depite anything fancy. We want to show the food in the most simple manner, as people would serve it at home and be as recognizable as possible. Still, it is DARN difficult to make food look good in photography. Food is a lousy subject.
If it is hot the steam makes the picture foggy. If it gets cold it looks ‘rigid’. If it is dry it looks unappealing, if it is moist it looks soggy. The bottom line is, the food that you consume don’t necessarily look good in a photo. Actually, chances are that even the most appealing of dishes looks unappealing in a photo. So we have to trick the eye. Well-cooked food looks limp in photos, so more often than not it has to be undercooked or even raw. Most photos have to be photoshopped because even the best of picture always has a flaw.
I refuse to do more than I mentioned above, but if you are going to show something on a large billboard any error will be shown 10 times bigger.
