Every time a burger commercial flashes across your screen and your stomach growls on cue, something deeply calculated just happened. Every time you watch a food commercial, it is easy to feel hungry shortly after, because the cuisine on screen looks like the epitome of deliciousness, crafted to trigger appetite and desire. Honestly, the gap between what you see and what you actually get is one of the most fascinating deceptions in modern visual culture.
The food might look appetizing on camera, but much of it is inedible by the time the lights and tools of food photography are done with it. Behind every drool-worthy shot is a food stylist armed not with spatulas and seasoning, but with motor oil, shoe polish, and shaving cream. Curious? You should be. Let’s dive in.
1. Motor Oil Instead of Maple Syrup
Here’s the thing that will ruin your Sunday brunch forever. Those glossy, golden waterfalls of syrup cascading over perfect stacks of pancakes? That is not syrup. A problem food photographers run into with taking pictures of pancakes is the syrup seeping in and disappearing. To resolve this, they swap out the maple syrup for motor oil. This has the same brown color but sits on the surface longer than syrup does.
Pancakes in advertisements are topped with motor oil instead of syrup or honey, and pancakes do not absorb motor oil, therefore staying spongy and fluffy through the long filming process. Real syrup soaks in within seconds. The camera needs minutes, sometimes hours. Motor oil wins. Every time.
No genre is as notorious as food photography, where some people suggest pouring motor oil on pancakes. However, some of these practices are literally illegal. Yet the industry has quietly used them for decades, and most viewers never suspect a thing.
2. White Glue Replaces Milk in Cereal Ads
Think about every cereal ad you’ve ever seen. That pristine white milk, with perfectly crisp flakes floating on top. None of that is milk. Real milk causes cereal to become soggy quickly, which is why food stylists use glue instead of milk in cereal ads. White glue is used instead of milk to maintain the cereal’s original form and prevent it from becoming soggy during long shoots. Using glue instead of milk allows the cereal to retain its crunchy appearance and texture for extended periods, making it ideal for long shoots.
The thickness and high opacity of glue gives a bright white appearance and keeps the cereal from getting soggy. The untrained eye might not even know the difference. A food photo shoot is not a quick snap. Because a food photo shoot takes an average of 10 hours, food stylists have to deal with melting ice cream, cold and dried-out burgers, and flat soda.
Ten hours. Think about that next time you pour a bowl and wonder why it never looks quite as majestic as the box.
3. Mashed Potatoes Masquerading as Ice Cream
I know it sounds crazy, but that beautiful scoop of ice cream in your favorite dessert ad is almost certainly a heap of seasoned mashed potato. Real ice cream melts in minutes, so food stylists often use mashed potatoes as a stand-in. Mashed potatoes hold their shape and can be tinted to mimic any ice cream flavor, ensuring that every scoop looks picture-perfect throughout a long shoot.
Filming and shooting ice cream is notoriously difficult because the frozen treat quickly melts. To combat this, a mixture of shortening, corn syrup, food coloring, and powdered sugar is combined to make a visual dupe. Some stylists go even further, mixing lard with powdered sugar and food coloring to craft an ice cream substitute that never droops, never drips, and never disappoints on camera.
The result is a perfectly sculpted scoop of something you absolutely cannot eat. Professional food photographers have “a tremendous bag of tricks for styling food, all of which make the food toxic and inedible.”
4. Shaving Cream as Whipped Cream
That luxurious cloud of whipped cream sitting on your favorite advertised hot chocolate or pie slice? There is a real chance it came from a can that belongs in a bathroom cabinet, not a kitchen. Whipped cream tends to lose its fluffy texture and melt quickly, so shaving cream is often used instead of whipped cream to maintain a consistent thickness and sculpted look.
Shaving cream will last much longer, giving the photographer more time to capture the perfect image. The shaving cream might be put into a pastry bag with a decorative tip just like real whipped cream is, or it could be spooned on things like cheesecake, pie, ice cream sundaes, coffee, or a bowl of fresh fruit. It is visually identical. Texturally flawless. Completely inedible.
If an ad is selling Häagen-Dazs ice cream, the ice cream must be authentic Häagen-Dazs, but the whipped cream might be shaving cream. On the other hand, if an ad is selling Reddi Wip whipped cream, the ice cream can be made from frosting and icing sugar, but the whipped cream had better be real. That is the unspoken rule of the industry.
5. Shoe Polish and Motor Oil on Meat
Grilled steaks and roasted meats in commercials look like they were kissed by a professional chef, burnished to perfection, with a sheen that screams freshness. In reality, that sheen often comes from a can of shoe polish. The motor oil is used to baste the meat to make it shiny, and boot polish is used to darken the meat if it looks too red.
Meat often looks smaller and drier once fully cooked, especially under studio lights. To keep steaks, burgers, and chicken breasts looking thick and moist, food stylists cook them only briefly. A quick sear adds rich colour and browning on the outside while the inside remains mostly uncooked. In other words, that gorgeous steak? Practically raw on the inside. Polished on the outside. Completely staged.
Most of these tricks use inedible items such as shoe polish, shaving cream, candle gel, dish soap, deodorant, super glue, toothpicks, and more to make the items look more appetizing than they really are. The list reads less like a kitchen inventory and more like a hardware store receipt.
6. Cardboard Hidden Inside Cakes and Pancake Stacks
Those impossibly tall, towering stacks of pancakes you see in breakfast ads do not achieve their height through batter alone. They have some structural engineering going on inside. Another alteration made to the pancakes was placing cardboard between each level to give some added height.
The secret is shoving well-cut cardboards between the sheets and covering them with a bit of cream. The cream can be absorbed into the cake sheets, therefore shrinking them and making them look old. The same trick is used with a tower of pancakes as well, since the cardboards make them look more fluffy and tall.
It is essentially architecture. Food stylists are, at their core, structural engineers in aprons, building edible-looking monuments out of materials that have no business being near a breakfast table.
7. Glycerin and Deodorant for That “Fresh” Look on Produce
Have you ever noticed how fruit in ads looks like it just rolled off a dewy, sun-kissed vine? Plump, shiny, impossibly fresh. That freshness is largely artificial. Food stylists douse everything in glycerin, the Swiss Army knife of fake freshness. Beer bottles, salad leaves, fruit – all get slathered in this sticky goo.
For good food staging, shooters use spray deodorant to add a slippery and shiny coating to the fruit and make them more delicious-looking. Spray deodorant on your grapes. Glycerin on your lettuce leaves. The goal is a moist, vibrant, “just picked” appearance that would vanish within minutes under hot studio lights otherwise.
Food stylists use various techniques, such as arranging food in a visually appealing way and employing tricks like spray deodorant to add shine to food. That glistening, fresh-from-the-garden look is mostly chemistry. Not produce quality.
8. Toothpicks, Sponges, and Super Glue Inside Burgers
The architecture of a commercial burger is genuinely jaw-dropping when you see behind the curtain. Food stylists put sponges inside hamburgers to make them look taller and use toothpicks to hold the ingredients in place. Every single sesame seed on that bun is placed individually. With tweezers.
Stacked foods like sandwiches, burgers, and pancakes need to be built layer by layer, carefully ensuring that each ingredient is easily visible and appetizing. The layers might be held together with toothpicks or T-pins, and propped up with cosmetic sponges in the back so that the top layer sits at the right angle.
Recent lawsuits highlighted a significant disconnect between the advertised and actual sizes of products from fast-food giants McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell. Consumers felt misled by promotional images that depicted products as larger and more laden with ingredients than what was served. This case underscores the growing concern over “food styling” and its role in creating potentially unrealistic expectations about food portions.
9. Fake Steam From Soaked Tampons and Cotton Balls
Nothing says “hot and fresh” like wisps of steam rising from a bowl of soup or a plate of pasta. The problem? Food cools down fast under studio lights, and real steam disappears almost immediately. So stylists get creative. Very creative. Tampons are soaked and microwaved to create steam – and yes, that is a real technique used on professional food shoots.
Stylists use several tricks to create steam that sticks around. They might use a clothing steamer or cigarette smoke, or even specially made “steam chips.” In some cases, they might microwave wet cotton balls and place them behind the dish to create the perfect steamy effect.
It is hard to say for sure how widespread each method is today, but food stylists and photography educators have confirmed these techniques publicly for years. That inviting plume of steam rising from your “freshly cooked” advertised meal? It could be sourced from a bathroom cabinet item microwaved in the corner of the set.
10. Dish Soap for Beer Foam, Wax for Sauces
Beer always looks spectacular in a commercial. That thick, lasting head of foam sitting perfectly on a frosty glass looks like the most refreshing thing in the world. Reality? Beer foam disappears fast. The foam you get from beer eventually fizzles out in real life, but to make sure it doesn’t disappear while filming, advertisers pour in some dish soap to make the beer look extra frothy.
Sauces get their own treatment too. The secret to that glossy, thick sauce sheen in ads is wax. Many advertisers add in some melted wax to make the sauce look shinier and have a less chunky texture. Real sauces tend to look thin, flat, and surprisingly dull under studio lighting without a little chemical persuasion.
Trust in the food industry dropped from 67% in 1995 to just 23% in 2024, according to remarks by food strategy expert Maha Turini at IFT 2025. Honestly, when you learn what is actually in those “delicious” shots, that number starts to make a whole lot of sense. The surge in misleading advertisement lawsuits in the food industry serves as a crucial reminder of the need for transparency and integrity in marketing practices. As consumers become increasingly savvy and regulatory bodies more vigilant, the industry must navigate the fine line between creative advertising and misleading information more carefully than ever.
The next time a food commercial makes your mouth water, pause for a second. That gleaming steak, those perfectly peaked swirls of cream, that towering burger – all of it is the product of shoe polish, shaving cream, cardboard inserts, and a very patient person with a pair of tweezers. What looks edible on screen is, more often than not, something you would never willingly put in your mouth. Did you honestly expect your breakfast cereal ad to contain glue?
