One of my all-time favorite candy bars is 3 Musketeers. So light. So soothing. So delicately sweet.
And in the picture above, so absolutely fake.
Did you know that the food shown in print ads is almost never real? Real food melts, wilts, congeals, solidifies, spreads out on the plate, and otherwise reacts with its environment and the hot lights of the studio, so it’s very difficult to photograph in an appealing way.
Nowadays they probably just use Photoshop or something, but decades ago they used sculptures that were anything but edible. My father was one of the original Mad Men and one day he brought home this hefty block of clear, wavy glass that had a little slot drilled into it. I remember him putting it on the coffee table, sliding a straw into the slot, and saying “There you go.”
The sculpture was for an ad for drinking water, and in photos it did look like someone could take a long, refreshing slurp through the straw. However, on the coffee table it looked like a giant, melting ice cube. Whenever people who had never been to the house before came to visit, they would stare at it like they weren’t sure what were seeing. Then they would reach down and touch it very gently and nimbly with just their fingertips. Upon realizing it was room-temperature, they’d slowly put their whole hand over it, and invariably they’d say, “Oh, my God, I thought that was REAL!”
Sometimes they’d even pick it up. By the time the 80s rolled around, dozens of people had held it up to the light, turned it this way and that, checked its weight like they would a melon’s. It was about three-and-a half, maybe four pounds—light enough hold in one hand, but heavy enough to do some damage if swung. My parents were always spritzing it with Windex and wiping it down because it would get covered in fingerprints.
And that, friends, is why I’m still out here, twenty years later, roaming free and unpunished while the one who did me dirty is in the ground and the one he did me dirty with—my bestie, she who swore up and down that she would always be there for me and have my back, the woman I trusted like a sister—is in the clink. All I had to do was show her that sparkling clean little sculpture. All I had to say was “Check this out! My parents left it to me. It’s glass!”
She never could resist touching what was mine.
zenzalei 