on food "styling"

I love food photography,--not that I'm so great at it myself, just that I think it's really interesting to see how the same recipe can look so different when made by different people and for different purposes.  There was once a fascinating article in Cooking Light (not in their archives, unfortunately, but this fun post shares a lot of the same info) about what food endures before it can be photographed for publication.  I'm not so much talking about that as I am about how we present food for eating at home.

All that is a leadup to this: Do you choose which dishes to use based on the food you're serving?

Maybe I'm the only one who does this.  It kind of hit me today when I was cutting up some cantaloupe ('loupe around here) for lunch.  I pulled out the bowl on top of the stack and it was--gasp!--orange.  And when I put the cantaloupe in there, it looked kind of pallid and odd.  Which made me realize that I often choose serving pieces especially (but dishes for eating too) based on what the food looks like.  Is this weird?

 

The middle one should probably actually be my favorite considering where we went to school, but the last one turned out to be most appetizing to me.  Yes, I did dirty three bowls do do this "experiment"--but it's OK since I'm the one who does the dishes.

Further proof that this concept is somehow very important to me is this shot, which I took weeks ago for no other reason than that the sight made me smile:

More food display weirdness that I now realize I'm carrying around with me:  I really don't like most patterned serving pieces and most of my collection is plain, I really like food to fill up the plate or bowl (and consequently end up spilling a lot when I over-estimate the size of the piece), and I don't like using two foods of the same color in the same dish (like red tomatoes and red peppers in a salad--one of 'em has to be yellow).

Thank you for letting me get this off my chest.