What it takes to be a food stylist for movies and TV shows

• When food is needed for a scene, directors prefer to use real food in movies and TV shows, and somebody has to make sure it looks right on screen.
• Chef and food stylist Zoe Hegedus worked on "Midsommar," where she baked over 100 pies, prepared about 50 fake yolks, and plated 200 real yolks for the production.
• In order to keep food fresh for long shoot days, food stylists will do everything from spraying foods to make them look shiny, to preparing "fake" edible meat that won't go bad.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: This is a dish from the movie "Midsommar."

Pelle: I was most excited for you to come.

Narrator: You might think that bright yellow center you see is an egg yolk, but it isn't. See, over the course of a 10- to 12-hour filming day, egg yolks tend to dry out and change color. So Zoe Hegedus came up with the idea to top some of the plates with edible spheres made of orange and mango instead. That's a day in the life of a Hollywood food stylist.

When food is involved, and it's involved in movies a lot, food stylists have to figure out how to make the food pop on screen no matter what hurdles are thrown at them. They're the movies' biggest problem solvers you never think about. The first thing a food stylist needs is to be prepared to make a lot of food for a lot of takes. For this scene in "The Amazing Spider-Man," the food stylist cooked 90 branzinos. And the food stylist for 2014's "Chef" made 800 Cubano sandwiches.

Zoe baked over 100 pies, prepared about 50 fake yolks, and plated 200 real yolks for "Midsommar," a horror film that takes place at the height of the Swedish Midsummer festival. It's a celebration, so naturally there were a ton of food requirements.

Zoe Hegedus: Directors, they prefer not using fake things on movies. It's really important for them to use real food, so I always try, like, do everything real.

Narrator: These little butter churches were actually made out of plaster and are one of the few fake food items audiences saw in "Midsommar." If you're using real food, you have to make sure it tastes fresh.

One of the first problems Zoe had to solve was what to do with the meat pies, which had to be edible for this shot. The movie was filmed in Hungary during the late summer months of 2018, one of the hottest summers on record in the country, so keeping a pie filled with meat out in the sun for a 12-hour shoot and then asking actor Jack Reynor to take multiple big bites for multiple takes wouldn't go well, and there needed to be something inside the pie.

Zoe: You can't make the same size and texture with an empty pie. For example, this shape wouldn't stay if it would be empty.

Narrator: The solution? A filling of oatmeal mixed with cocoa powder, which is going to last a lot longer out in the sun. Oatmeal mimicked the texture of ground meat, and the powder mimicked the color.

Zoe: Oatmeal is a really, really good ingredient to use on set and on camera because you can shape it and, like, color it with, like, edible ingredients and make something also that is tasty.

Narrator: She had to get even more creative for what would be the toughest challenge of the entire movie, that dish with the egg yolk in the center, called the Sun's Eye. Both the specificity of the ingredients and the sheer amount made this dish a huge challenge to bring to life.

Zoe: It's supposed to have pickled herring in it, but we didn't put it because it wouldn't really change the look of the dish, but it would have been impossible to use herring on that day with the heat and, like, the smell.

Narrator: That intense heat not only dried out the yolks, but it caused some of them to burst out on the first go-around. That meant Zoe and her team had to change the dishes out every 15 minutes. On top of that, some of the cast was allergic to eggs, so Zoe had to completely rethink the center of the dish. Instead of using yolks, she made those mango and orange edible spheres. She put the frozen mixture into a sodium alginate solution, where a thin membrane formed to give it the right texture. Put it next to a real egg, and you can barely spot the difference.

One challenge for any movie is keeping food that's been sitting out looking fresh. So Zoe relied on some tried-and-true tricks of the trade. She sprayed potatoes with cooking spray to make them look like they were fresh out of the oven. She mixed water and oil to top the egg yolk dish, which not only made it look fresher and tastier for longer but also added some weight to the chives, which kept getting swept away in the wind. But there's a risk of going too overboard. Cooking spray looks perfect on potatoes, but if she used corn syrup instead, it would've looked too shiny. In addition, she sprayed the apples with only a couple spritzes of water. Any more and they might start looking fake.

Zoe: It's like, just because you see some water drops on something, you can feel that freshness.

Narrator: And speaking of apples, there are a ton of them lingering in the background of "Midsommar." You might have noticed them in the kitchen as Dani baked pies. Even this background item had to be vetted, and it wasn't as easy as picking apples up from a store. They had to look like they were grown in the commune.

Zoe: So, it was important to see that the apples are grown really close, because it's important to show that they have it in the community where they live and it wasn't just bought somewhere in the supermarket.

Narrator: The perfect apples for this scene actually needed to look imperfect, like they were just plucked right off a tree. So half of them are from a nearby farmer's market, and the other half were literally plucked off trees.

Zoe: You can see it's smaller. You see some, like, ugly dots on it also.

Narrator: The most elaborate project Zoe and her team worked on was the May Queen feast. They had some freedom in designing the display but still had to follow some important rules. Everything needed to look rustic, it needed to be traditionally Swedish, and it needed to feel like it was grown locally, so there was a lot of trial and error.

One cake Zoe made was rejected because it looked too modern, but this Hårga man pie, shaped like a man lying in apples, met the specifications and made the cut. So did this dish made with a goat carcass, which likely would have come from their farm. The team also did a lot of background research, like reading Nordic cookbooks to make sure everything they used was part of Scandinavian cuisine. Their findings showed up on the table.

They found that asparagus was used for special occasions in Sweden, so they built this asparagus tower, which took them up to five hours to construct. In the movie version, the base is made up of meatballs, which helped it pass the rustic test.

Crayfish-centered parties are a Swedish tradition, and the crustacean would likely be something the commune would find around them, so the food-styling team spent around six hours building this elaborate crayfish tower.

Since these displays weren't meant to be consumed by the actors, freshness was less of an issue. However, as with the Sun's Eye plates, the vegetables would dry out in the sun, so Zoe changed pieces out as frequently as possible.

Something most chefs don't have to think about is how their food will be filmed. Zoe knew there would be a lot of shots from high above, so she made sure every single display was really big and really colorful. But what happens when there is a piece of food you need and it isn't even available in the country you're filming in? The movie needed a fresh herring for this scene, where Dani attempts to eat one whole. This moment was specifically built into the script.

Server: It's tradition, for good luck.

Sten: Yeah.

Dani: What?

Narrator: Herring is incredibly abundant in Sweden, but the movie was filmed in Hungary.

Zoe: In Sweden, you can go to every market, and you just find the herring. But, like, in Hungary, I went, like, all the markets, all the shops, and I found, like, smoked ones, like, pickled ones, but without head, or it was too small, or it was too big, or it was just not good for the movie. So at the end, the herring had to be shipped from France.

Narrator: They got 20 pieces shipped to them. They were shipped at the last minute, and the team had little room for failure. The most important thing for the scene was that actress Florence Pugh was comfortable. So Zoe took 10 herrings and cut and prepared the fish in multiple styles to give Florence and the filmmakers options. In the end, they landed on a fish that was boneless but still had its head and tail. They were able to get the perfect take after seven or eight tries.

So, why didn't Zoe make her life easier and get a fish she found in Hungary or just have the art department make a fake fish that met the scene's needs? Because without that real fish, you wouldn't have gotten that authentically horrified look on Florence Pugh's face, and that's when going the extra mile for your food in a movie makes it all worth it.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in December 2019.