Not about the Babuyan Islands

I recently had a chat with a friend of mine who is both a painter and a photographer. We met in a well known coffee shop somewhere in Glorietta, Ayala area. He just got home from a photo shoot in the Babuyan Islands. He went island hoping in that group of islands in the northern part of Luzon. He told me that all the islands were extremely beautiful, but there is a catch, the price tag for that is a five hour boat ride under the sun, in a small boat, with gigantic waves. That boat ride was so memorable not just because it changed his color from brown to browner (or should I say brownest because any additional shade of brown would make him black already), but because he was holding to his dear camera as well as his dear life during the wavy and rocky boat ride. One of his colleagues even fell from the boat and got his camera soaked in water.

But let’s not talk about the Babuyan trip because as the title suggest, this isn’t about the Babuyan islands. When the waiter finally served the food we ordered, it lead me to a question “Why doesn’t my food look like the one in the picture?”. My friend told me, “You don’t know what you are asking for”. I asked why? “You will die if you eat that” he said. I thought it was a joke so I rode with it, I said “of course I won’t eat that, that’s a picture, I know that.. ”. “No, no, no, I’m not talking about the picture. I’m talking about the actual thing that was photographed” he said. “What do you mean? It looks so delicious and mouth watering” I said. He told me that some things doesn’t appear as they are. He told me that the foam on top of the picture of the cappuccino, in the real life, is really soap mixed in coffee and was meticulously fashioned to look like that. He also told me that the picture of the ice cream I was looking at isn’t ice cream. Ice cream doesn’t roll when you scoop it with spoon. In reality, it’s mashed potatoes with food coloring. The delicious syrup on pancakes, isn’t really a syrup, its varnish.

It shed light to my question ever since I was a child, “Mommy, how come every time I try to roll the ice cream I often ended up chipping just a piece of it?”. Guess what? She also doesn’t know.

I know what your thinking and I agree. I wouldn’t want soap or vanish anywhere inside my mouth, its just so amazing how the food designer in cahoots with the photographer were able to convince my eyes to perceive it to be delicious. It’s called the Art of Food designing.

~ Nobody