Ever wondered how many sandwiches the freckly youngster has to eat to make that bread commercial? Cherry Ripe reveals the secrets of our top food stylist.

For the past decade, his work has been impossible to avoid for television viewers. From McDonald's to chicken tonight, Buttercup bread to Praise mayonnaise, he was there making the product look good enough to eat.

Robert Carmack is possibly Australia's busiest food stylist. He's also in demand overseas, having done TV adds for KFC in Beijing and Häagen-Dazs in Japan. As the sometimes food editor of local magazines Interiors and Easy Entertaining and the author of three cookbooks, Carmack's primary work involves cooking food to perfection - and keeping it that way - for the camera.

Behind every luscious-looking image in magazine, newspaper, TV or print ads, a food stylist would have been involved. Yet it is a profession few would know about.

Everyone's heard about the stories about the tricks: shaving cream for ice-cream or mashed potato; plaster of Paris for icing. Yet in the better recipe magazines,. the food is WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get.

"Everyone looks at food styling as faking food and lots of tricks, but the reality is to show the true product in it's best light," says Carmack. "Good food stylists enhance rather than deceive. They create an actual representation of the product within the restrictions of the set.

"The bigger and more important the client, such as McDonald's and KFC, the more rigorous they are in honesty showing their product. In any commercial for a large food company that I have worked with, I have used nothing but their product, their buns, their patties, their pickles, their lettuce."

So why don't the real burgers look the same as on TV? "Fresh bread squashes," Carmack explains. "When they wrap it, it shrinks." He admits, however, to taking creative licence by, say, shifting the pickles to make it look more visible.