Transcriber: Trinh Ha Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Good evening, my name is Payal Gupta,
and I style food for a living.
Surprised?
Now, you all know about food being cooked and garnished,
but did you know that there existed a field called food styling,
where food is cooked for its look and not for its taste.
Most of you sitting here would have a hard time believing this,
considering that world over
people eat food for its taste and not for its look.
So go back and recall those instances
when you picked up a given brand of food
in a supermarket
because you loved the way its packaging looked.
You might have even ordered a dish from a restaurant
because you loved the image of that dish in their menu.
What about those times when you felt a surge in your hunger
on seeing a sumptuous food hoarding on the roadside.
Now, in all the instances I just mentioned,
there was one common element,
and it was a trigger: "I want to eat that now."
That influenced you to purchase that given brand of food,
and behind each of these triggers was the work of a food stylist like me.
So what does a food stylist like me actually do?
Well, I work like a makeup artist for food -
cooking, tweaking, and garnishing food
till it looks absolutely beautiful and perfect
to be photographed by a photographer or a videographer.
Now food, as we all know, is all about taste, textures, and flavors,
and I make people experience it visually through my images.
My images are used by FMCG and non-FMCG companies
to sell an idea or a product related to food.
At work, I use a mix of culinary science, my artistic tools,
and my tricks
to make the food look hot, fresh, and most importantly, delicious.
So now know that this obsession
to make food look appealing and beautiful is really not a new one.
Back in the 1800s when the first cookbooks were being published,
they contained vast sections of their publications
dedicated to the idea of plating of food.
Our own Hindu mythological tales
have tales about gods and goddesses being served beautiful food to please them.
Now, as this cookbook, magazines, and the advertising industry grew,
so did this art and today it's popularly called "food styling."
So let me give you a real glimpse of what I do at work.
Consider that it's Christmas time of the year,
and I have to make a turkey at home.
On a normal day while making a turkey at home,
I would buy a turkey from the market,
stuff it up with vegetables, tie it up, and roast it in the oven.
And here's how my home-cooked turkey would look.
However, when I have to food-style the same dish, here's what I would do.
I would buy a turkey from the market, then seal the tears of my turkey
using a super glue.
Yes, you heard it right.
I would use a super glue to seal my tears.
Then I would stuff my turkey and tie it up beautifully.
Finally, I would seal the open ends of a turkey using a T-pin.
Yes, a T-pin.
And here's how my stuffed, T-pinned, glued, and tied turkey would look.
I would then brush my turkey with oil and half-cook it in the oven
to avoid shrinking its skin.
I would then cool my turkey down to room temperature
and prepare browning liquids to brush the turkey all over.
All this in an effort to make the turkey appear fully-cooked.
I might even use a torch to blowtorch my turkey
in a couple of spots to enhance the cooked appearance.
Finally, I would plate my turkey on a beautiful looking platter
and garnish it with fruits and vegetables
and use tweezers to place herbs on the side.
And my final food-styled turkey would look like this.
Now, let's compare the home-cooked and the food-styled turkey.
A closer look at both the turkeys reveals a stark difference.
Note that though from the color,
both the turkeys completely looked cooked to perfection.
However, the home-cooked turkey lacks the deliciousness
that the food-styled one has.
This in spite of the fact
that the food-styled turkey is only half-cooked.
Now, notice that I have not used any extraordinary ingredient
to make my food-styled turkey.
What I did was to change my approach towards the cooking,
combine ordinary ingredients,
and come up with a better-looking version of the dish.
Following the same approach I have been food-styling in India
for the last six years,
and I have food styled for more than 100 brands during this time.
My food visuals have been used
across mediums like websites, billboards, and packagings to name a few.
Now, as I reflected back on these achievements,
I realized something really beautiful.
All along my styling career, I have been combining simple ingredients
to come up with beautiful dishes.
In fact, I have been using the same approach in my life
to become successful.
So here I am today
to share the ordinary ingredients behind my extraordinary life with you.
So now where did this all begin?
I grew up in Kolkata, and I was raised in a traditional Marwari joint family.
From the beginning, my family faced financial difficulties,
and that made me a strong and a determined individual.
Now, ours was a family of food lovers,
and home was always abuzz with sights and sounds of food.
Both my mother and grandmother were excellent cooks,
and the sight and the smell of the food cooked by them
always seemed to have an uplifting effect on me.
When I was eight years old, I sold food in a carnival with my mom
and took back home rupees 100 as a share for my hard work.
During that carnival, most people purchased our food
because it looked beautiful,
and this observation remained etched in my memory
and heavily influenced the choice of my career in the later years.
Now, post the carnival, I continued my explorations with cooking,
and slowly it transcended from being a mere hobby to becoming my core passion.
However, the difficult financial situation at home was a stark reality
that I faced each day,
so getting a job to support my family really became the need of the hour.
I then decided to go the traditional route and I pursued a BSc in Economics.
Post completing my studies, I took up a job in a multinational company
as a qualitative researcher, and I moved on with my life.
Now, though on one hand, I was really happy
that I was shouldering my family's responsibility,
but on the other hand, the endless cycles of meetings and presentations
made me question myself regarding the choice of my career.
The artist in me needed an outlet for creative expression,
and the passion inside of me was slowly dying.
I needed to break free to get a breakthrough,
and yes, I did.
I quit my job.
Once out of the job,
I started to explore the possibilities
of having a much more enriching career for myself.
I did not know what I wanted to do back then.
I only knew that as a child, I purely loved cooking.
In spite of this, working to be a chef was not on my priority list.
I wanted an artistic career for myself where I could work at my own pace,
be my own boss, and still explore my passion for cooking.
And around this time, something magical happened.
I happened to see an animation movie called "Ratatouille."
Now, this movie is all about a lowly rat called Remi.
Remi has a talent for cooking that he does not know about.
In fact, he discovers it accidentally
when he watches one of the greatest chef of France
talk on TV about his book - Anyone Can Cook.
Remi is truly inspired.
He then sets out on a culinary adventure in one of the finest restaurants of Paris.
And the series of events that follow
transforms Remi from a lowly rat to a chef
cooking for a Michelin star restaurant and gives his life a new direction.
And as I sat there watching the movie,
I got some of my own answers, and I took back three key learnings:
No.1: We should all pursue our talent even if it means breaking a stereotype,
know that your talent and sincerity will someday get noticed.
No.2: The difference between good and great cooking
is the courage to try new ingredients in an already established recipe.
And No.3: Like anyone can cook,
anyone can style, paint, teach, draw, sing - the list is endless!
Now, like Remi, I too had my moment of inspiration.
In my mind, I remembered that when I was a 14-year-old kid,
I was awestruck by an image of food presented by the famous chef Jiggs Kalra.
And at that juncture,
I got my breakthrough idea that changed my life forever.
And my idea was to train myself to cook and present food beautifully -
an art called "food styling."
Inspired by what I had seen in the film,
I then set out on my culinary adventure,
combining these two ingredients - cooking and art -
in the search of an extraordinary life for myself.
Now, know that the decision to be a food stylist
met with challenges both at home and outside.
At home, my parents were very unhappy about the choice of my career.
And outside, I realized that there was no school to teach me this craft.
I had to find my own unconventional way to learn this craft.
At that juncture, I had to make a decision.
I had two options:
I could either quit and go back to my corporate job,
or I could believe that I had a talent for styling food
and that my talent and sincerity would get noticed.
I decided to stick to the latter.
And for the next few years, I assisted a food stylist on a job.
I educated myself in culinary school,
and I worked in hotels and restaurants part-time,
all in an endeavor to learn the art of food styling.
Now, this time of my life was a rather difficult one.
On average I worked between 15 to 18 hours,
and financially I was on the brink.
During these moments, I drew inspiration from my strong mother and I moved on.
Having worked with my mentor for 2.5 years I then decided to branch out on my own.
I was not sure about how I would generate work,
but I trusted myself
because a wise man once said:
"Like anyone can cook, anyone can style."
The hunger to be a food stylist was so great
that it propelled me to borrow money from family and friends,
and off I went to Bangkok to the world's best culinary school,
Le Cordon Bleu, to study to be a chef.
During that time, I survived mostly on bread and coffee the whole day.
Complete meals were a luxury back then.
I ensured that I made all sacrifices
to have completed my studies in an uninterrupted fashion,
and finally this paid off.
I graduated as a chef from the world's best school.
And I fulfilled my dream of becoming a food stylist
by taking my first step towards it.
Post returning to India, I took up a job as a chef,
and I continued to work and style part-time.
Now initially, the jobs that I got were really small ones.
In my mind, however, I never discriminated between them as inferior or superior.
I looked at each one of them as a stepping stone in my life.
With each assignment, my experience grew and so did the conviction in my craft.
And slowly I started to style
for established national and international brands.
And the images that you're about to see on the screen are an outcome of that.
(Applause)
Now finally, when I established myself as an independent stylist,
I realized the need to upgrade my talent.
I could no longer take my past success for granted
and be completely relaxed about it.
And from that point onwards, mind you,
I started to be courageous
in experimenting with newer food styling ideas at work.
It was exactly this methodology
that got me my first international award last year in the field of food styling.
(Applause)
So now know that there's a great future that this industry holds today.
Today, it's no longer a craft known to few or practiced by few.
It's truly gone global.
Today, high-tech machines and robotics are being used to aid a food stylist
in producing stunning food visuals.
Studying culinary arts itself and working in the field of food
is no longer limited to being a chef.
You could be a food forager,
a flavor expert, a chocolate explorer, a food researcher, a food critic,
a food blogger, a food rigging artist - and the list is limitless!
Now know that you do not need any extraordinary ingredient in your life
to have an extraordinary life.
What you actually need is to reprogram your mind
to be able to relook at the education that you've received in your life differently
and derive value from the ordinary things in life.
So go, explore your hidden talent, break a stereotype,
and climb the positive slope of your life guys!
Thank you so much.
(Applause) (Cheers)