Playing With Food : Towering Cones, Dangerous Kiwis and Other Tales of Horror

“It was a scene from either a Marx Brothers movie or hell, I don’t know which,” food stylist Carol Peterson remembers. Seven blue jays were pecking at the tops of 30 pies she had just produced for a television commercial.

In the food-styling business, disasters are plentiful. Ice cream melts, souffles fall, the photographer’s assistant accidentally drops the cake you’ve spent hours working on.

“Boy, could I write a book,” says Connie Hankins, a marketing home economist and advertising food stylist, who once called off a shoot because a wind machine--and an unexpected rainstorm--caused the food and props to float away.

Then there’s the time food stylist and cookbook author Mabel Hoffman spent days preparing ice cream molds, ice cream cakes, ice cream muffins, ice cream rolls, and ice cream balls of many shapes and sizes for a photo shoot to illustrate a book on ice cream. Everything was frozen solid and stored overnight in the studio freezer. And then . . .

“That night the lights went out in Hollywood,” Hoffman says. “Why someone chose that night to plow into a utility pole and cause a blackout, I don’t know. But when we got to the studio the next morning there was ice cream soup everywhere. I had to spend another several days reworking the entire setup.”

“Making do is all part of the job,” explains magazine and advertising food stylist Fran Paulson. She once spent hours cooking three turkeys in her home kitchen for a studio shoot the next day, only to have her cats eat the turkey tails. “I just patched up the rear ends of the turkeys with dough and carried on,” she says.

Turkeys, it seems, are a constant food-styling headache. They’re big and bulky and difficult to get perfectly brown in a conventional oven. Often, stylists will turn to a propane torch to get the skin golden brown.

Turkeys also provide good story material. Some decades ago, a frugal food department editor insisted on photographing the same Thanksgiving turkey year after year--between shoots, it was stored in the freezer. “By the fifth year, the thing had gone rancid and stank up the place something awful,” says the food stylist who threw out the bird without the editor’s permission. The editor was furious when she heard that the bird had been tossed. She apparently felt the old Tom had a few more years left in him.

Sometimes, getting the food is as difficult as making it look good. Magazines, for instance, work months in advance, which means stylists are often searching for unusual or out-of-season ingredients. Food stylist Robin Tucker remembers having $1,000 worth of blueberries shipped from New Zealand for a magazine photo that required only a handful. And once, on a styling job for a period film, Barbara Swain, home economics consultant, cookbook author and food stylist, had to come up with a piglet that was small enough and light enough to be carried by what the script described as a “wench.” “I personally visited every meat-packing house in town I could think of,” she remembers. “I called all over the country and finally found one at the swine unit of the animal husbandry department of a local college.”

Even an innocent-looking fruit such as a kiwi can cause problems. One food stylist peeled hundreds of the furry fruits for a kiwi promotional shot and ended up with burned finger tips. Another food stylist had to be carried out of the kitchen when fumes from the chiles she was chopping caused a choking attack. And an art director says she almost drowned after diving into a pool to save the patio props when a wind gust swept everything into the water.

Carol Peterson, owner of Food Design (they specialize in food styling for ads, commercials and labels), recalls a disaster that occurred during a live segment of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” “Ed McMahon wanted the hot dog hot when he bit into it,” Peterson says. “So, taking him literally, I watched the timing of the shot carefully, only to turn around and see the prop man eat the hot dog before it got to Ed.” It was one of the few times Peterson says she’d ever considered murder. “If I’d had a knife I would have run it into him then and there,” Peterson says.

Once, for a TV commercial, Connie Hankins and several other stylists had to figure out how to balance 50 ice cream scoops on a single cone. “We finally bored holes into the solidly frozen ice cream scoops and then ran gun-cleaning rods through them,” she says. “The only problem was that the host who was supposed to carry the cone started weaving across the set trying to balance the darn thing. It turned out we had to get up on a scaffold and hook the scoops to transparent fishing line. It only worked for five seconds. But then, that’s all the time we needed.”