Back to the plastic food factory

I did a story last year on plastic food samples – the kind you see in the windows of restaurants and cafes everywhere in Japan. Well it was so interesting that I went back to the factory to take some photos of my own just before Christmas. (I was working with a photographer for the first story).

This is the company. It’s in a pretty run down and grey part of Tokyo. You’d have no idea of the technicolor weirdness going on inside.

plastic food factory

Here is the president of the company holding two great big packets of plastic meat.

They use photos of the food to copy.

plastic food

Now, the secret to plastic food, I found out, is that its made using real cooking equipment and techniques. This is a photo of one of the craftsmen at the company chopping a plastic cucumber roll!

making plastic food

The whole place was pretty surreal. There was fake food piled here and there as if they’d forgotten to clean up after an office party.

Would you realise this was made from plastic?

plastic food hamburger

Here’s a slideshow with the whole set and captions.

Here’s a link to a gallery on my archive with all the photos: plastic food factory photos.

possibly related posts

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 4:37 pm. It is filed under my photos, Tokyo and tagged with plastic food, Tokyo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Back to the plastic food factory | Hazel Woods says:

January 22, 2009 at 7:03 pm

[...] the original here: Back to the plastic food factory | Tags: made-using, plastic-food, real-cooking, secret, that-its, [...]

David Vasta says:

January 23, 2009 at 1:33 am

I lived in Japan and knew they had to come from somewhere. These photos are very cool, and yet the rest of the world knows nothing about this art.

Nelly says:

January 23, 2009 at 3:05 am

I really enjoyed the photos you posted the last time. I’d love to visit a place like this someday. I guess it’s not open to the public, though.

Thanks a lot for posting these photos!

Pacific Tides » Yum!?! says:

March 2, 2009 at 11:24 am

[...] in Tokyo and he visited one of the plastic food factories at the outskirts of Tokyo and has a great slideshow and article on this subject on his [...]