I've done some food styling in the past and you are correct, some STRANGE things are substituted for the "real thing." Due to the hot lights used in photography sessions, real food couldn't stand up to the temperatures for more than a few minutes.
My recipe for "ice cream" was Crisco and confectioner's sugar. Mix it in the right proportions, scoop it out into a bowl, and it REALLY looks like vanilla ice cream.

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It looks like anvari.org lifted many of the food photos from one of my favorite sites, thewvsr.com. Give credit where credit is due.

Check out:
http://thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm

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I've been present at quite a few food photography shoots (three cookbooks and maybe some 100 picures) and there's a lot of "cheating" going on. But. I must say that we've been tasting the photographed food often enough. Here's another idea on the same track one might say; a German art project where they have bought 100 ready made meals, cooked them and photographed the package and the actual result. Quite intersting. And disturbing if you are in the habit of buying and eating ready made meals. Enjoy:

http://www.smartstuff.se/pages/engelska/eng_edibles_1.asp#werbung

It's in German, but the picures tell the story.

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One that I've heard is that the milk in cereal bowls is often vegetable shortening, they just shove the cereal into it.

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The orginal of these 'comparisons' is believed to be on Jeff Kay's West Virginia Surf Report:

http://www.thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm

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Sunny Anderson just did a blog post on the food Network food styling
http://sunnyanderson.blogspot.com/2008/05/making-food-ready-for-its-close-up.html
There is one tip you would never expect

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This is enlightening about the power of advertising.

What's crazy is that they have to use real food in the ads. Advertisers just end up going through about 1000 of the same product before finding the most photogenic food.

http://red-icculus.com

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THIS is how they get you! You think you are eating one thing. But you are really eating another. There is not trutch to advertisings.

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All that and more ! The operative parameter is you're trying to make things look fresh, moist, cooked, hot, and/or cold as need be while they sit out all day long on a tabletop, at room temperature and under warm to pretty hot lighting. meticulous attention to detail is EVERYTHING. The woman I worked for for a year loved it that I could iron a tablecloth so well. The silverware has to be spotless, the glasses and table ware ditto, and the set is cleaned of any dust, pollen or crumbs with a combination of canned air , artist's fan brushes, and sticky tape loops on the eraser end of a pencil. Test shots are carefully inspected to be absolutely sure that no lighting equipment, fixtures, or people are reflected in anything.

The cornflakes are patiently sorted and picked over by the food stylist's assistant, laid out in rows on paper towel-lined trays. They will go through a dozen or more boxes. ( ditto for anything involving cookies. ) The stylist, using long medical tweezers, inserts individual flakes into a bowl filled with either cream cheese, mashed potato, or Crisco. Some use a secret recipe of a combination of the three, ( also substitutes for ice cream. ) and jealously guarded. Getting the filled bowl to be perfectly flat and level so as to simulate a liquid is an art unto itself. The contents are built up painstakingly, flake by flake; there will be a "test" bowl to use on the set for preliminary testing, and a "hero" bowl for the actual shoot. There may be more than one hero so the art director can have their little power trip.

The beads of moisture on the tomato slices in a burger / sandwich photo are clear glycerin drops, again applied individually, this time with the point of a long kebab skewer. When you want a glass to sweat, it's misted with a glycerin/water formula ( again, a state secret ) until it beads up just enough to start to run

Bread is often coated with clear flat lacquer, especially if it's going to come in contact with soft or wet food.

There's so much clear gelatin added to the molded Jello to make it heat tolerant on set, you can leave the suckers out all day and over a weekend, and they don't melt. They'll bounce pretty good off the floor too.

When shooting ice cream, it gets really dicey if you're shooting a Brand for Advertising. I never worked on such a job, but it involves a lot of doctoring of the ice cream, and freezing it rock solid, and having a lot of samples to shoot.
You can't use the mashed potatoes if it's supposed to be Hagen- Daaz.

I have seen not one but TWO Crown Roasts of Pork ( tester and hero) go in the trash after a job shooting for small tabletop appliances. Flamed with a small hand torch to look done after roasting for an hour to "set"; still raw inside.

Ice cubes may be carved blocks of lucite, or a silicone-based material that is mixed with water, poured into a tray and once set, broken up. It's coarsely cut with a knife for chunky bag ice or raked out with a fork for shaved ice.

Lighting glassware is a whole other chapter. basically, it reflects everything, so you work, very, very hard, to add reflections, and kill reflections.
a small circle of a silver-coated card stock is under the glass to reflect light up into the liquid. black cardstock is just out of view, as close to glass as it can be and still not be in the shot, to add a defining edge to it's shape. Reflections and hotspots are killed by suspending wire frames covered with varying thicknesses of black netting between the light source and the subject.

Clear water in a glass is vodka, the cheaper the better. Water in a glass heats up during the day, and bubbles form on the sides of the glass.
Once worked shooting 8 full tumblers of water for a moisturizer ad - "8 glasses of water a day." The studio reeked of liquor by the day's end,
and breathing vodka for that long is mellow, but gives you a big head.

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