Fast food - advertising vs reality

As the saying goes, never judge a book by its cover. How often have you, salivating with anticipation, unwrapped your lunch only to find something limp, squashed and depressingly smaller than you expected?

When does the food you buy actually look like you expect it to?

Campbell Live randomly chose one menu item from four popular fast food outlets, and brought them back to our studio unwrapped and untampered with to take a look.

Burger King's Double Whopper claims "double the satisfaction", but how would the Rolling Stones write the ad? The real burger just doesn't quite measure up.

But it is bigger than our next contender, the KFC Tower Burger - a mighty fortress on the poster, a mere snack in the palm.

In the advertising, Subway's roast lamb sub is positively bursting with enthusiasm, but in reality it's just depressing. Where are all the ingredients?

McDonald's describes the new Grand Angus like as "a thick tender patty of succulent New Zealand angus beef, gently resting under a canopy of gourmet baby salad leaves". In reality, the patty looks okay, but where are the baby salad leaves? The Grand Angus we bought is using bog standard ice-berg.

Amanda Cooper-Davies is a food stylist. She says each of the adverts are misrepresenting what is on sale. "If they say it's going to be one thing and it's another, maybe it's that they've run out for the day and you'd give them the benefit of the doubt - but they shouldn't advertise it as one and give you something else."

McDonald's blamed the difference on "recent rain across the country and demand for Angus since launch". They said their website was "the only place a reference to baby salad leaves appeared. We have changed this to the more generic description as salad mix can be seasonally dependent."

So why did the food we bought look so different than the advertising?

Food moves. Packaging and bagging may squash it down. But Ms Cooper-Davies says companies must strive for accuracy.

"If you see a really high burger, you want it to be a really high burger when you buy it."

These days the food in the ad is actually real food, it's just served up with a few tricks and a spot of Photoshop for afters.

And it's not just fast food that promises heaven on a plate.

We selected five heat-and-eat meals to see how they measured up at home. Remember the image we see when we're choosing a product has been carefully constructed.

Sometimes food for a photo shoot is not prepared the way the company expects you or I to prepare it.

"What I would have done is cooked each ingredient individually, got what we call the 'heroes'," says Ms Cooper-Davies. "So I've cooked lots of chicken, and those two pieces are my very favourite pieces and I've placed those in the sauce."

But, as you would at home, we carefully followed the cooking instructions on the packaging. Our aim - to match the box presentation as closely as possible.

None of the meals, bar a McCain lasagne, closely resembled the packaging. One product, a canned stew, looked completely different – as if someone had cooked a nice Irish stew, and used that for the packaging instead of what was in the can.

So there's a fine line between making something look enticing and giving a truthful representation - but can you complain?

"I think you can complain if it is so far removed from the picture, the image you thought you were buying," says Ms Cooper-Davies. "It's worthwhile speaking up."

But it's unlikely that brands will drastically change the way they represent food because, if you saw the reality on a billboard, would you buy it?