So they lied...

We all know what we are shown that fast food should look like. Advertisements surround us and even the menus themselves show a beautifully tempting masterpiece of culinary skills blended perfectly with an artistic touch...

So you order the McPerfect meal from any fast food chain and get it home (or more realistically, pull it out to eat in the car) and it looks absolutely NOTHING like the photo.

Thanks to The West Virginia Surf Report, there's a photographic study that shows just how badly these things look.

According to the study: "Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all."

I'll show you some here. The top image is the product picture in the store; the one below it is actual product.

First up, McDonald's Sausage Breakfast Burrito:




And Arby's Big Beef N Cheese:



And Taco Bell's Nachos Bell Grande:


McDonald's Big Mac:

KFC's Famous Chicken Bowl:

Subway's Club Sandwich:

And Burger King's Whopper:

So how DO they get to look so good in the first place? Well, according to the ever-so-fun Neatorama:

Apparently, there are "food stylists" whose job is to make food look attractive for ads.

And they’ve got special "techniques" to do just that:

Besides choosing and arranging food, they sometimes use special effects techniques. They include:

* using tobacco smoke to give the appearance of steam
* spraying food with hairspray to hold it in place
* arranging mashed potatoes to look like ice cream
* painting cooked meat
* cereal can be photographed with white glue instead of milk, because the cereal does not get soggy quickly and the flakes stay where they are placed
* vegetables that appear to be cooked are raw and touched with a blowtorch and coated with glycerin to make them appear cooked
* ice cubes are hand-carved acrylic
* alcoholic beverage shots have water added to them to make them more transparent so the backlighting will work better

Yummy! Doesn't that sound tempting? Who's up for grabbing some fast food tonight?