By KIM SEVERSON

Although movies have long relied on half-cooked turkeys colored with motor oil, fruit made of plastic, and ice cream carved from shortening, food in film is increasingly edible and even delicious.

“Everybody thinks it’s all shellacked,” said Colin Flynn, a New Yorkbased chef and stylist who worked on the new film “Julie & Julia.” “In the ‘70s and ‘80s it was more like that. Food looked more like Plasticine. Nowadays it’s almost always real food.”

For food stylists, most of whom began as cooks, it’s a welcome change. And directors believe that well-prepared food can improve the actors’ performances and the look of the final scene.

But when the director Nora Ephron began shooting a pivotal scene in “Julie & Julia,” it quickly became clear that the sole meuniere might become her food stylist’s Waterloo.

Julia Child’s first lunch in Paris centered on Dover sole sputtering in butter sauce. It was, she wrote in her memoir, “the most exciting meal of my life.”

For that scene, Ms. Ephron - an accomplished cook who wrote the screenplay, directed the film and personally tested every recipe in the movie except the aspic - would accept nothing short of perfection. “I wanted that sole to look to the audience the way it had looked to Julia when it caused her famous epiphany,” she said.

Susan Spungen, the movie’s food stylist, who worked with Mr. Flynn, knew she was in trouble the moment she arrived at a Manhattan restaurant to shoot the scene. For starters, the chef Ms. Ephron had recruited to cook the sole was instead pressed into service as the scene’s waiter. Worse, Ms. Spungen had only about 10 of the expensive fillets to work with. That wouldn’t allow for many mistakes.

“I have no idea how, but we finally just got one that didn’t stick,” she said. The sole became Ms. Ephron’s favorite food moment in the film, which opens August 7 in the United States.

For Ms. Spungen, it is just one of several food miracles in a film where what the actors eat is as important as the actors themselves. For stylists, the game is all about reading the actors’ appetites and knowing when to employ a few tricks. But really, food styling boils down to prep work.

Mr. Flynn deboned 60 ducks over the course of “Julie & Julia.” Duck en croute becomes the crowning glory for Julie Powell, the New York administrative assistant whose 2003 blog about her yearlong effort to cook all the recipes in the first volume of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” helped inspire the movie.

Even when a little Hollywood magic has to be used, food stylists still try to keep it at least looking real. Two actresses in the 2008 police thriller “Pride and Glory” were vegan. So Ruth Di- Pasquale, an assistant property master for the film, called in a vegan chef to help style a big Christmas dinner scene that had a ham as the centerpiece. She ended up piling slices of sham ham made from soybeans near the real stuff.

Of course, there are plenty of times a food stylist has to employ tricks. Cherry pies are filled with mashed potatoes, poultry is partly roasted and painted with Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce, glycerin and water make beads of sweat on glasses, and ice cream is wrapped around dry-ice nuggets so it won’t melt.

Then there are live creatures on a set that must be dealt with properly. On “Titanic,” which was filmed in Mexico, the food was constantly sprayed down with pesticide to keep the flies off.

“It can be very unglamorous, really,” said Alison Attenborough, a New York food stylist who worked on the movie. “You still get the grips stealing the sugared almonds, even when you tell them they’ve been sprayed.”

In “Julie & Julia,” however, all of the effort paid off, Ms. Powell said. “The food is so much prettier than anything I ever made,” she said. “It’s like other aspects of watching your stuff go into the movie. It’s all much prettier than me.”





On the set of “Julie & Julia,” a food stylist combined tricks and real food to make Julia Child’s meals look as appealing as possible. The stylist, Susan Spungen, top, helped Amy Adams, above right, who played Julie Powell in the film. Meryl Streep, left, played Mrs. Child, below.