Fake food samples appear prevalently in the windows and display cases of food-serving establishments throughout Japan. They are usually made out of plastic. The plastic models are mostly handmade and carefully sculpted to look like the actual dishes. The models are custom-tailored to restaurants and even common items such as ramen will be modified to match each establishment's food. During the molding process, the fake ingredients are often chopped up and combined in a manner similar to actual cooking.
The craftsmanship has been raised to an art form and plastic food has been exhibited at places such as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Regular competitions are held in making fake food dishes out of plastic and other materials.
The plastic food manufacturers fiercely guard their trade secrets as business is lucrative; the plastic food industry in Japan, by conservative estimates, has revenues of billions of yen per year. A single restaurant may order a complete menu of plastic items costing over a million yen.
In recent years, Japanese plastic food manufacturers have been targeting markets overseas, such as China.
if only american food looked like their pictures....
0 comments:
Post a Comment