Want me. Taste me. Put me in your mouth and swallow. In grocery stores and in the pages of magazines, this provocation issues from gorgeous, glossy pix of food. This is gastroporn and it has never been bigger business.

THE TASK
Shoot a plate of grilled vegetables. Make it look good.

THE LOCATION
Hip west-end Toronto photography studio. Fourteen-foot ceilings. Natural light. Tens of thousands of dollars in equipment.

THE PLAYERS
The Shooter
Rob Fiocca. One of North America's most sought-after photographers. Works with an assistant and two office staff. The camera he uses to shoot the grilled vegetables is mounted on a 12-foot stable structure that gives him access to any height or angle. The camera is wired into two computers with enormous screens for instant viewing of the photos. With each shot, Fiocca discusses improvements with his team, makes adjustments and takes the next shot. This goes on all day.

The General
The client. This is a member of the corporate group or the editor of the magazine. On hand to make sure the final image is exactly as ordered.

The Visionary
The art director. The image maker. May have spent weeks or even months conceptualizing the shoot and choosing the palette (colour scheme).

Style Doctor #1
The food stylist. At this shoot, it's Claudia Bianchi. She brings her background in sculpture, commercial photography and cooking to the table. She uses her artist's eye, cook's techniques, and some very cool sculpting and dental tools to make the grilled vegetables look their best. Will spend days and travel miles to shop for the freshest, most visually perfect vegetables. Will usually make several versions of the product and choose the prettiest for the picture.

Style Doctor #2
The prop stylist. Catherine Mac- fadyen has bought and borrowed an array of props from stores around the city. Plates in ice blue, turquoise, chartreuse, sunflower yellow and, of course, contemporary white cover three large tables. There are bins of cutlery, from antique silver to ultra-modern plastic. She has garment racks filled with fabric, from brilliant sheer purples to hot pinks, green burlap and textured black velvet. Then there are the vases ? decanters and glassware that work as "background noise." They are the bit players that you may see as a shadow, a glint at the edge of the frame, in the background or out of focus. She needs to be prepared to supply anything the photographer or art director may think of at the spur of the moment.

The Caterer
Because shooting food is hungry work.

And you wondered why your food doesn't look as good as the pictures in magazines and cookbooks.

Food is sexy. Really hot pictures of food are enticing. A flat image, created by a skilled photographer, becomes visceral. Advertisers and editors seek to conjure a magical transformation from visual medium to sensual desire. If the picture is good enough, they hope we can almost sniff the heady aroma of freshly baked brownies or salivate in anticipation of a succulent chicken breast.

Do we hunger for it? Will we buy into the image and so buy the product? Advertisers are betting we will.

In cookbooks and the recipe section of magazines, the hook is the photograph. Once hooked, the reader covets the product, often attempting to recreate the dish. Results vary. Sadly, most home cooks lament that their product is just not as perfect, sublime, sexy as the dish in the picture.

There are myriad reasons for this. In part, it has to do with the skill of the recipe writer. In large part, it has to do with the skill of the cook. And then there are the style doctors.

Consider this. Your friend takes a picture of you. You probably hate it, but will admit that it's a fairly accurate picture. Now imagine that a team of professionals work on you for a day. Your hair is done by a top stylist, make-up is applied to complement your skin tone under studio lights, and a fashion consultant picks out the most flattering clothes for you to wear to a chic photographer's studio, where dozens of photos of you are taken. The best of these photos is then photo-shopped to remove even the smallest imperfections. The subject remains the same. It's still you. But wouldn't you expect the professional photo to be the more glamorous, idealized version?

In my work as a food journalist, cookbook author and recipe developer, I have taken part in many shoots working as a food stylist and consultant. The most straightforward have been for the Star's food pages and have included me, my food and a photographer. Little doctoring goes into these shots ? they're about accurately representing the subject.

A top-end commercial shoot, on the other hand, is the work of up to a dozen professional style doctors.

Many people think that fakery is the order of the day at these shoots, and indeed, in the past, the style was more fabricated. But the advent of digital photography, which allows the team to work more quickly, and a decade-long fashion for realism, have largely changed this. The food stylists I know and have discussed this with all work toward truth. Still, there are foods that simply won't behave as needed and require some illusion.

In his book, Digital Food Photography (Thomson Course Technology, 2005), American photographer Lou Manna offers a few styling gems. There are some pretty convincing pix where the milk in cereal is replaced with white glue. The cereal stays crisp and in place.

Stylist Delores Custer, who teaches the food styling course offered by George Brown College, disagrees with the glue trick. "If we're selling milk, we have to use milk and we shoot very quickly. However, if we're selling cereal, I use wild root hair tonic in place of milk. It's much better than glue because it flows and if you need to move a flake (of cereal), it doesn't stick and drag and form a glue skin on top."

To keep cooked bacon pliable, Manna suggests placing strips in vegetable oil. Then, to make strips wavy, weave them through the rungs of a wire rack. The final touch involves spooning soapy water over top to give it that hot, bubbling look. Soapy water will also make a cup of black coffee look freshly poured.

Want those sesame seeds to stay in place on your bagel? Position and adhere with crazy glue.

Looking for a recipe for fake ice cream that won't melt under studio lights? Stylist Rosemarie Superville insists that real ice cream is always used if ice cream is the product being sold. However, if it's only a garnish for the main event, most stylists have a few recipes for "ice cream Crisco" in their repertoire. Manna's contains vegetable shortening, corn syrup, powdered sugar and food colouring. This is beaten together and stored at room temperature, ready to stand in for the real thing.

There are more tricks, what Custer prefers her students think of as "techniques," but when it comes down to it, these days most of the food is real.

The greatest doctoring I have ever done has been to add stabilizer to whipped cream. And once I baked a plain custard pie to stand in for banana cream and used an Exacto knife to carve in the bananas after the fact. Because, honestly, have you ever seen a good picture of banana cream pie?

Still, the real trick is simply that stylists take incredible care with the food. Shopping can take days. If shooting a packaged product, the stylist will prepare five or more packages and choose the prettiest. Tools are used ? from long, sharp tweezers, to dentist's tools and an array of brushes ? to make surfaces perfect and to position each element in the most flattering light. These are not lengths I will ever go to when preparing dinner for my family. It would be psychotic and I cannot imagine a future when I might ever have that kind of time on my hands.

Then there's light. A good team will have a thorough understanding of how food appears through the camera lens and the effect of light on the subject.

Fiocca shot the grilled vegetables in natural light and worked with ways to reflect that light. Then, scrutinizing the picture in minute detail on the computer screen, where 1-centimetre blocks of detail are blown up individually, he points out the effects of the light.

Sunlight is reflected in the oil on a tomato so that there is a tiny starburst in a drop of olive oil. You really won't see it when looking at the whole picture, but it's there, and on some level this makes a difference.

Fiocca points out how the blue of the sky is reflected in the arch of a tomato and I pretend to see it. To be honest, I see only a red tomato, but I believe the blue is there because he can see it. It's beautiful. Sexy even.

Pamela Steel is a Huntsville-area cookbook author and recipe developer.