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Walking the streets of Japan, you'll notice that almost every restaurant has glistening, perfectly plated food tempting you from their window.
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It looks mouthwatering, but you can't actually eat it.
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It's all fake.
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These deceptive dishes are called sampuru, from the word "sample."
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The fake foods are made of plastic, and to this day each one is crafted by hand.
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Food samples give a 3D picture of what the foods look like.
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This, along with the historical background of artificial food samples, has allowed them to become widespread.
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Sampuru is so lucrative, the industry is estimated to be worth $90 million in Japan alone.
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But let's take a step back and see how they make plastic look good enough to eat.
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At the Morino Sample Workshop in Osaka, artisans have been making sampuru for 45 years.
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Fourteen artisans make all of the food samples shipped worldwide for the company Fake Food Japan.
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They specialize in sushi, tempura, and ramen, but they can custom-make just about anything you can dream up.
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Beer, ice cream, pizza, burgers.
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To craft sample food, first the artisans have to get a mold of the real thing.
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Usually, that means a restaurant will have to freeze the real food and ship it to the workshop.
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Casting molds from real foods allows us to copy the fine bumps and depressions along the food's surface.
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We then color the molds in order to bring out realistic food textures.
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Once they've got a mold, it's filled with liquid PVC plastic and baked up to 338 degrees.
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The sample is brought to life with airbrushing and paint, and finally it's plated.
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Some smaller models can take a day to make, while entire entrees can take up to a week.
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Making this udon noodle sample involves getting the ingredients together and making a mold, depending on the sample and takes about three days.
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But if you're doing all of this work for every sample, it's very time-consuming.
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For common items like udon, meat, etc., I prepare all of these ingredients in advance.
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This lets me speed up the work.
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Because of the detail in each food sample, artisans say it takes up to 10 years to perfect the craft.
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But don't be fooled, while they might look like affordable eats, sampuru will set you back a pretty penny.
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These imitations can cost up to 10 times the real food they represent.
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This mug of beer costs $74, a bowl of ramen costs 109, and an intricate tray of sushi will set you back a whopping $511.
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The level of difficulty in reproducing it: that is solely the cost.
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Just based on the fact that the ingredients and the way it's presented just creates so much more and a level of difficulty for the artist to reproduce it.
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It's said that fake food production began in the 1930s with Takizo Iwasaki, an artisan from Gujo Hachiman.
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The story goes, he made an omelet out of wax that was so realistic his wife couldn't tell it apart from the real thing.
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He would go on to start one of the biggest plastic food manufacturers in Japan, that now controls an estimated 60% of the fake food market.
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By the 1950s, fake food had caught a wave of popularity.
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However, what really boosted the business was during World War II, from what I've been told, when a lot of the American servicemen were stationed here.
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And they couldn't, obviously, read the Japanese menus and there weren't any photos on the menus, so then let's have a visual representation to show people what we actually have on our menu.
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Today, even in an era of online menus, food blogs, and Yelp reviews, these plastic food samples aren't going anywhere.
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Sampuru has landed on the big screen, in classrooms, and souvenir shops, and, of course, in restaurant windows.
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As mass tourism has exploded in Japan, sampuru has served as an invaluable tool for foreigners across language barriers.
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Even if they don't know any Japanese, they can just point at what they want to eat.
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It's something that's very unique to this country, something that's been around for going on now, you know, almost 100 years and it still survived.
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Its significance in Japanese culture can be seen on literally every corner, but it's the skill behind the sampuru art form that keeps us salivating.
