Bukom’s Fighting Fists
A look into Bukom’s prized fighting tradition.
This promise of succulence… it takes you places.
Maggie Ruggiero
A FEAST FOR THE EYES
Food stylist Maggie Ruggiero is in the business of seduction. “Good food photography has to has to be titillating”, says Ruggiero, “you’re trying to trigger everything. You’re trying to tap into that human desire.” Flipping through Ruggiero’s catalogue is to be seduced with the rapturous sensuality of food and the lavish pleasures of eating. With each closeup, edible textures are imbued with a reverence that is redolent of a Caravaggio supper.
As a regular contributor to independent food journals, the New York based food stylist understands the visual currency of her medium. “Food porn isn’t just about lust and gluttony, it’s about envy,” Ruggiero explains. “There’s so much vanity involved in food. Part of its porn is that it can be decadent.” The stylist continues to elucidate on an industry technique called ‘The Cheese Fall’, in which a cheese-filled food item is pulled part to reveal exceptionally succulent golden threads of fat and cheese. “When you have something that has cheese in it and it pulls apart like that, people go nuts,” says Ruggiero, “it’s all about suggestion. You have to keep things wet, moist. Glistening always helps. This promise of succulence… it takes you places.”
Charles Spence, a Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford is deeply empathetic to the seductive potential of lavishly composed food portraits. He recognises that it takes a special kind of quality to efficiently tantalise and convey gastronomic pleasure. “Nothing gets people’s brains more excited than a picture of food when you’re hungry,” says Spence, “we just can’t turn off that evolutionary part.
THE EVOLUTION OF DESIRE
Part of that evolutionary quality is tied to the concept of “sensation transference”, a well-used advertising technique that plays on the unconscious transfer of ideas of one thing onto another. It is a means of fetishising consumer goods. According to Spence, colour, sound, and setting have a proven effect in modifying consumer perception. As an example of this theory in practice, food served in heavy bowls seems more dense and blue food somehow saltier.
The power of the carefully perfected food image has never enjoyed greater currency than in these current times of social influence. “We are starting to see a whole set of food that is primarily for visual consumption”, explains Spence. As any savvy, enthusiastic foodie would attest, a social media food shot must be primed and namechecked with a network of hashtags to influence and convey gastronomic credibility. “There is an overemphasis on the beautiful and downplay on taste,” laments Spence of a digitised food culture proliferated through an endless stream of likes and shares.
Within the industry, restaurants are responding to the reality that food now exists for the imagination of the online consumer. Recently, a restaurant in Israel went so far as to commission curved plates that included smartphone slots to illuminate the dish within a perfect halo of light.
Today, where the worship of food, consumption and technology co-mingle in the digital age, the emphasis on perfection and exhuberance have urged us to rethink the ways we communicate about one of our most complex and lifelong relationships with food, and how the pleasure of a meal is to delight with both our eyes and our bellies.
