If you’ve been to a fast food restaurant, you already know this, but here’s the side-by-side evidence: Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality
On one side is the food-stylist-designed picture-perfect advertisement version that exists only through the magic of superglue and fake ingredients that only look like the actual ingredients. On the other is a representative example purchased at random from a local fast food chain.
It ain’t pretty, yet Americans spend billions on the bait-and-switch meals every year. I guess looks aren’t everything. Or taste, I suppose. So why do we buy them?
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You know, there is no accounting for taste. I know why I patronize McDonalds and Burger King. I love the Burger King Sandwiches (Chicken sandwich with cheese, my personal favorite) and McDonald’s Fries. I rarely get them for myself because I know they’re very unhealthy.
mmm, makes me hungry.
It’s not just fast food that uses pictures of fake food done up by an artist. It’s very likely that any restaurant that you go to with pictures of the food in the menu is using similarly manufactured idealistic depictions of your choices rather than a photograph of the real thing. Any food-related advertisement that you see (except perhaps for cheaply done local ads) are going to have fake food that looks better than the real thing.
This doesn’t bother me, so I’ll play “Devil’s advocate,” and be philosophical about it.
It doesn’t bother me because I don’t expect it to look exactly like the picture; I don’t take the picture to be a promise of what it looks like, but what it is.
So, for example: the ideal Big Mac shows onions…about ready to fall off the sandwich; but how do you show that there are onions, if they’re inside? Same with all the pickles and special sauce oozing out.
So, an interesting test would be to try to re-create the image in the picture, using only what comes with the purchased product. Can the ingredients be so assembled to look like that?
The “image versus reality” thing only ets to me in terms of desserts, particularly at Shoney’s. Shoney’s shows you these amazing pictures of their “famous” pies and desserts, and you get this small square of something that tastes like syrup and cardboard.
As for fast food places, the images dont really phase me.