Fake Food Japan - 食品サンプル How to Make Plastic Food? Behind the Scenes
Part 3
For many years, fake food was created from wax such as the kind that I'm holding in my
hand right now. For those of you in Japan, you've probably seen footage of fake food
such as lettuce and tempura being made from wax on TV.
When making lettuce from wax years ago, first you needed a water tank filled with water
hot enough to melt the wax. Once melted, you would add the appropriate colors. For lettuce
these would be white, yellow-green, and green. White is for the inner most part of the lettuce
followed by yellow-green and lastly green.
When adding the colors to the wax, we would add one on top of another, so in the case
of lettuce we would start with white, then yellow=green and finally green. Next you rolled
up the wax into a ball and then cut it in half. Once done, you'd have yourself your
very own lettuce just like this replica.
Here is another wax-made example of shaved ice or what you would call a snow cone. Once
again, this was how fake food was made years ago - from wax. But today when you were making
your cake and parfait fake food items, the fruit and ice cream toppings that you added
to customize your item were all made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC). And for the cream,
it was made from silicon.
Nowadays all of the industry manufacturers are relying upon PVC and silicon to make their
products. Even with that said, many people outside of the industry still think that fake
food is made from wax. But in reality, the fake food manufacturers have been using mainly
PVC for years.
Now, when it comes to making fake food for the first time, initially you need to make
a mold such as this one. Normally when making the mold, we use a real food item to make
sure that we get the right size proportions and the intricate surface characteristics
of the item. For example with a canned sliced orange, we have the rigid surface. That's
why it's imperative to use real food items when making the fake food mold. It makes it
very easy to replicate items over and over. In the case of making a fake food replica
from wax as was done years ago a mold wasn't used such as this one but rather a gelatinous
mixture. I'm sure many of you have had jello before. The kind of jello that we used was
highly concentrated. Once hardened, it would turn into something most resembling konnyaku.
For example when making a canned sliced orange, first we would need to buy the physical item
and place it into a rectangular container similar to the one that I"m holding here.
From there we would pour a gelatinous mixture into the container and over top of the canned
sliced oranges. Once the gelatinous mixture has solidified, we would scrape off the top
layer in addition to extracting the canned sliced oranges. What remains after completing
this process is a perfect mold. Once created, we would pour an orange colored wax into the
mold and let it dry. Once dried, we'd have our very own fake food replica of a canned
sliced orange.
Now since we don't use wax but rather PVC, we make the mold from silicon for starters.
For your information, wax melts when heated and dries when cooled, however PVC doesn't
react the same way. For PVC, it is in liquid form as you can see in the bottle that I'm
holding now. When this PVC liquid is heated, it solidifies which is the exact opposite
of the way that wax reacts. Even though the color of this liquid is white, once heated
it turns clear or transparent. Before heating our silicon mold, we add orange coloring to
the PVC liquid followed by placing it into that oven over there pre-heated for 170 degrees.
For a container similar in size to the one I'm holding here, we tend to leave it in the
oven for about 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, we have ourselves a perfect looking canned
sliced orange made of PVC.
This Concludes Part III. Move on to Part IV.
For more information visit:
English site: fakefoodjapan.com
Japanese site: fakefoodjapan.net
