Photo courtesy of Russell French

He lives in a world of plump burgers and juicy red steaks. Every turkey comes out of the oven glistening and chestnut brown, on its way to a Norman Rockwell tableau.

And every frosty mug of beer has a high head of foam, created with the same care and patience as an Antoni Gaudi spire.

Meet Russell French, food photographer (and perfectionist), a man who knows how to make your mouth water.

The secret? Steaks and burgers are wrapped in plastic and then boiled to get just the right redness. Turkeys are sprayed with a concoction of vegetable oil, soap, and food coloring to turn them golden brown. For the beer, shellac is applied to the glass to get beads of condensation and a spritz of foam stabilizer keeps the frothy head high.

And what about those mile-high stacked sandwiches that grace advertisements and the pages of food magazines? “They’re a cartoon,” French jokes, “because no one can really eat something that big.”

Welcome to the deceitful world of food photography. When shooting advertisements for food, these photographers are required by law to use the real product, however all surrounding food can be fake. For instance, an ad for ice cream cones can use fake ice cream piled high—which according to French is usually a mixture of powdered sugar with shortening.

But French likes the real thing. “I don’t like to fake it with food,” says the man who helped open a chapter of the “Slow Food” movement in Portland, Maine, which is dedicated to counteracting “fast food…fast life (and) the disappearance of local food traditions.” As much as possible French uses authentic ingredients and has developed his own bag of tricks.

When he shoots ice cream in his studio, he uses the real thing, bringing the temperature down to zero degrees so it’s very hard, and he hires a food stylist from Boston who works on achieving the optimal swirl (it’s that swirl that makes ice cream so tricky to shoot, not the melting) so French can focus on the lighting and photography.

“You have to scoop the ice cream in just the right way to get the perfect swirl,” French explains. “And then if you have a swirl with nuts in it, it’s even more difficult because if you drag a nut through the swirl, it ruins it.”

All of this attention to detail is time consuming, which not many people realize. “People come here and think it’s going to be 20 minutes and then they’re out,” French says. Most assignments take hours and part of that time is getting the lighting right. “Lighting is really what sells the food,” he notes.

It also takes a lot of product. French says he might buy six or seven turkeys because he can’t see what they’ll look like until he unwraps them and he wants to use the best looking one. The same thing goes for potato chips. He might buy six bags of chips to get the best handful of chips for a dish. And he’s careful to note that all of the extra food is donated to the local soup kitchen.

French says he can sometimes spot food trickery in advertisements and magazines. He notes that high-end food magazines are usually pretty authentic but more commercial food, such as the national burger chain ads, employ more trickery. “They will use a lot of product to get that perfect piece of lettuce,” he adds.

True, but if the ad does what it’s meant to do, we’ll be headed for the drive-thru.