Morgantown Magazine Fall 2020 Edition

FOOD AS ART A local cook and food stylist makes food look so good it’s hard to know whether to eat it or just admire it. EAT THIS

variations until she arrives at the final recipe. It’s not unusual for her to spend an entire day cooking one thing—slicing carrots just so, achieving the perfect char on a cut of meat, ensuring the icing on a scone has the perfect drip. Then come the pictures. It takes hours for Furbee to get all the shots she wants. She arranges the background, switches out plates, highlights key ingredients, fusses with lighting, all to create an image worthy of a magazine and your drool. She offers insights to other aspiring food photographers out there: It’s imperative to invest in good equipment, she says. And trust your natural eye when you compose your dishes. “A lot of people can cook delicious dishes,” Furbee says, “but being able to make it look beautiful, too, is next-level.” She says it takes patience, discipline, and passion. Furbee’s day job is as an employer relations specialist for West Virginia University’s Career Services Center, but she longs for the day that her work as a professional food stylist and photographer becomes her main gig. She got connected with Walmart after her high showing at the World Food Championships. The retail giant approached her about developing recipes, creating video content, and submitting food photography that Walmart would use company-wide. She jumped at the chance. “My dream is absolutely to do this full- time. I think this is my talent and calling in life,” she says. “Food is 100 percent my creative outlet. When you think of art, people don’t often think of food and photography. But the composition of the colors and textures and how to pull them together and present them in a way that makes people want to eat what I make is definitely an art form for me.”

➼ MORGANTOWN’S BRITTANY FURBEE loves to play with her food. She’s an artist, but not a typical one. She creates works of art with kitchen ingredients as her medium, both by developing exciting taste combinations and by making her dishes look out of this world in photographs. Furbee is a self-taught cook who found a path all the way to the World Food Championships—an international competition that draws more than 1,500 chefs and home cooks. She’s competed a few times and came in ninth place last year, an astounding feat considering the crowded field. Her meritorious dish was a soft-shelled crab eggs Benedict that wowed the judges in flavor and presentation. She plans to compete again this year. Furbee also made an appearance on the Food Network show Cooks vs Cons in 2015. The show pits professional chefs against amateur cooks, and the judges don’t know which are responsible for the dishes they try. Furbee was declared the winner after judges sampled her Asian catfish po boy and her steak and eggs Benedict topped with blue cheese. The key to winning food competitions, she says, is the presentation, and her background in photography—she studied in college—comes in handy. She doesn’t use additives to make meat look juicier or plates more appealing the way food photographers often do. “I think you don’t need to use tricks to fool people into eating food,” Furbee says. “It just comes down to being creative with the presentation so the dish screams to them ‘You have to eat this.’” Furbee says it takes weeks for a dish to go from inception to photo shoot. She starts by formulating the recipe in her head. Many times she practices multiple times with slight

written by HOLLY LELEUX-THUBRON

16 MORGANTOWN • OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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