Who She Is
Susan Spungen was the founding food editor of Martha Stewart Living, joining at the magazine's launch in 1991 and shaping how it presented home cooking to a national audience until she left in 2003. She then moved into food styling for film, working as the culinary consultant and food stylist on movies that put cooking at the center of the story, including Julie & Julia, It's Complicated, and Eat Pray Love. Her job on projects like those involves more than making a dish look good in a single shot, since food in a movie has to hold up through multiple takes and camera angles, and sometimes an actor eating it on camera. She has since written several cookbooks of her own, including Open Kitchen (2020) and Veg Forward (2023), bringing her styling eye to recipes for home cooks. Her career shows how a food styling path can move between magazines, film, and cookbooks rather than staying in just one lane.
Why She Matters
Spungen's work sits at a rare intersection of home cooking and Hollywood, translating recipes real people cook into food that has to perform for a camera and an audience. Styling food for film adds a layer of difficulty that a still photo never has, since a dish often needs to survive being cooked, plated, and eaten multiple times across a single scene. Her background in editorial food writing also means she thinks about a dish's story, not just its appearance, which shapes how she builds a shot. Her path shows there is not just one kind of career available in food styling, since print, film, and cookbooks all demand slightly different skills. She represents someone who kept expanding what a career in food styling could include rather than settling into one specialty
