Joining humour and attractive images has been very used in the last product campaigns. If you make the public smile you won some points, that’s probably the idea. The agency DDB Sydney used this strategy to the last year’s campaign of Wrigley chewing gum “Wrigley’s Extra”.
Those commercials were starred by a group of super cute food creatures designed by TWiN™. The cute CG characters full of personality interact with live action scenes on the Wrigley’s Extra commercials, directed by Jonathan Baker.
The ads had some success since there was a first Wrigley’s Extra commercial, then the Wrigley’s Extra ‘White’ commercial, and a new campaign this year starred by the same group of characters for the new “Wrigley’s Extra” chewing gums.

The adorable taro root mice bellow were created by Jimmy Zhang, a chef and produce artist in San Francisco. The image is part of The New York Times‘ slideshow Playing With Food, which also includes more images of food turned into art by James Parker, Hugh McMahon and Saxton Freymann. It’s part of the article Knife Skills: Creating Feasts for the Eyes by Kate Murphy. She presents the carved watermelon sculptures by Mr. Parker and explains the growth of those kind of creations using fruits and vegetables:

“We’re seeing more fruit and vegetable entries every year that are incredibly creative,” said Thomas Smyth, chairman of the Salon of Culinary Art, an annual competition sponsored by the Société Culinaire Philanthropique in New York. Recent eye-catchers, he said, have included melons carved to look like Fabergé eggs and lifelike cocktails made of butternut squash, carrots and papaya.

Probably part of the “guilty” of the current appetite for whimsical produce art belongs to Saxton Freymann, which published in 1997 book Play With Your Food, with pictures of brussels sprouts pigs, broccoli poodles and lemony bears. The article also presents a video with Hugh McMahon carving the portrait of James Beard in a watermelon.
Related posts:
Jeu d’oranges
Food to amuse
Maurizio Savini
Funny sausages
Cuisine Sandwich

The Italian artist Maurizio Savini makes amazing sculptures with fibreglass and pink chewing gum. Mario Codognato wrote about his work:

The sensual act of chewing, the voluptuous warmth of rebelling saliva, the artificial and secretly aseptic fragrance which spreads from the mouth as a promise and missed kiss. The synthetic fleshliness of the pink color, the obsessive square shape of the product unwrapped and ready to be shred to pieces by the power of the tongue, all compete in crashing on the senses. Applying all this to the power and energy of the Sculpture and its history causes a short circuit having the capacity of turning the ludic into stately and vice versa. The strict minimalism of parallelepiped is subverted by the uniform coating with many bars of chewing-gum completely cover it, rendering chewable to desire, soft and provoking to forbidden touch, what was abstract and distant.

More images of his works at Pastificio Cerere Foundation, Olivier Houg Galerie, artMbassy, Arts blog.it, Angel Art Gallery and bellow. (via Notcot)

Some mothers are better than others, I mean, when the issue is kids’ lunch box. Biggie, from Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento, is one of those dedicated, talented and with a lot patience, mothers and wives, in her case. She makes those adorable lunch boxes in bento style, and shares recipes, tips and techniques of their preparation. She’s also a proud creator and admin of those Flickr groups: Lunchbox Recipes and Kid Eats.

Related posts:
E-obento
Bento Yum
Cooking Cute
Cute bento boxes
Bento Windows & Bento Art

Nicole Gastonguay is a graphic designer, however, she has another talent: crochet. She makes marvellous (and super cute) crochet toys. And for toys I want to say adorable crochet food and animals. It’s impossible not love her smiling creations with googly eyes. Seriously. Look at this squid, this robot, this robot hotdog, or this cup of coffee on Flickr. Even the glue is smilling. I just feel bad about this very sad piece of meat.
By the way, if you want to try some of those, here are the bad news: She doesn’t really have patterns. She makes things up as she goes along. (via MetaFilter)
Related posts:
Amigurumi
Patricia Waller
Monster Crochet
Hand-crocheted HIV virus
Make your own Dalek

The photographer Carl Warner has a gorgeous portfolio with still life pictures, pictures of locations, cars, nature, sports, people and animals. But I wasn’t there for those images, and they worth a visit. I was interested on his visually delicious foodscapes: surreal landscapes made of bread, vegetables, mushrooms, salami, houses made with cheese, fruit balloons and giant trees of broccolis. I must say his amazing manipulated images of fantastic worlds, like in a Italo Calvino’s story, must be seen. (via mixirica)

The site e-??????????? (e-obento) documents the beautiful daily bento and other lovely food creations of a Japanese mother. Each has a brief story and a list of ingredients. Some of them have grades for nutrition, design, speed and saving. All in Japanese, but the translator helps a little if you want to try any of them. (via Make)
Previous Bento posts:
Bento Yum
Cooking Cute
Cute bento boxes
The Meaning of Food
Bento Windows & Bento Art

There’s Something In The Water is a blog, and part of a clever campaign to promote V Water, an English flavoured water with vitamins. The themes keep calm and don’t stress are emphasize in the cheerful animated film created for it. The video reminds the Max Fleischer’s animation News Sketches, made in the 1940’s. (via Blogeek, merci Bertrand!)

The agency Cayenne Italia produced a brilliant campaign for Italian Instituto per il Commercio Estero (Institute for the Promotion of Foreign Trade) highlighting two remarkable Italian products, known for their excellent quality: food and fashion. The campaign “The Italian Food Collection” was firstly created to the Japanese market:

The objective, effectively summed up in the title, was to communicate to the Japanese consumer – notoriously fascinated by Italian fashion – that the best of “Italian Style” is to be found in the wine and food sector as well, which boasts top-quality brands. [...]
The campaign, which enjoyed a huge success, was considered a particularly innovative, high-impact operation, to the point of winning numerous prizes at the international level, among them the GOLD in the food category of the Epica Award 2003, one of the most prestigious European advertising contests. UN.I.P.I. representatives attended the awards ceremony held in Dublin on 23 January 2004.

Due to campaign success of the visually beautiful and attractive ads, it was possible to obtain the support of the ICE for the realisation of a communication campaign in the United States. Playing with the same concepts, food and fashion, Cayenne Italia created one more great campaign for the ICE: “The Taste of Italian Style”. Check the irresistible ads for both campaigns bellow.

The Taste of Color is a neat photographic study by the Swedish professional food photographer Björn Lindberg. Take a look at the pictures and try to image of what kind of food each one has. You will be surprise by the results. If you like it, explore his other pictures of his previous study of colours and food published as books.