You can tell these beans have just been sprung from the moist recesses of the microwave because that butter is melting all over them, its succulent fats dribbling down each toothsome length of still-crisp bean. The camera’s lens captures every little detail, and shot just fast enough to catch the slivered almonds in flight as they spill down into the soft nest below. Spotlights hit the slightly rough surface of each bean, bringing to mind the miniscule hairs that you can only feel with your tongue. Soon, they won’t be able to hold the pose and will start the inexorable slithery collapse upon the plate amid a pool of fat flecked with black pepper.
There is such thing as too much of a good thing. Food photography took a major turn in the early 1980s from haphazard snapshots of highly staged plates to highly staged photos of haphazard food. Instead of being held at arm's length, just-cooked, still-steaming items were shot in so much detail that you could practically see the molecular structure of each morsel. This is the photography of sports and porn. In order to demonstrate the oozing readiness of foods mostly cooked in the now-ubiquitious and affordable microwave, it was often photographed being prodded, skewered and otherwise pierced by metal serving instruments of some kind. The result is a kind of food styling with distinctly S & M overtones.
Carousel Microwave Cookbook, Sharp Electronics Corporation, 1983