From a childhood fascination with cooking, to possum trapping and living off the land as a hunter and forager, Annabel Langbein has always been obsessed with food. A 2020 Word Christchurch highlight.

From a childhood fascination with cooking to possum-trapping and living off the land as a hunter and forager, Annabel Langbein has always been obsessed with food. This talk was a highlight of the 2020 WORD Christchurch festival.

Listen to Annabel Langbein in conversation with Jo Malcolm about her memoir Bella

In a long and diverse life working with food, Annabel Langbein has experience of food styling - preparing food for a photographer - and she has some confessions to make about that period of her career.

Jo Malcolm:

You got into dressing food for photoshoots. You look at the food on ads. I had no idea of all the hideous things they do to make it look like that.

Annabel Langbein:

That lovely steaming ham, it used to be hydrochloric acid.

Jo Malcolm:

And what were some of the other ones?

Annabel Langbein:

Lots of tampons to make steam. And when I did it in America, a food stylist would turn up with a plumber's kit, with so much stuff to make almost fake food. On the West Coast, I had this hilarious time with a USA film crew. It's always hilarious in hindsight. Those terrible disasters that you have give you great stories for later on. At the time you're asking yourself, "What do I do now?"

And they wanted cherries, because they were doing yoghurt, and had this opening scene with the sun, and the table with the honey coming through, and every cornucopia of fruit available in the world. And I was phoning Harrods for cherries, Dean & DeLuca, Balducci's.

Nobody had cherries.

So I got the art department to paint polystyrene balls with various colours of nail polish. And then the makeup department got cross that I was using all the makeup remover and the nail polish. So I went into the local Four Square shop, and there was a bowl of cherries - perfect, fake, Eastern European glass cherries!

The lengths that you go to, to do things like that.

Jo Malcolm:

The next phase for you, when your culinary education really kicks off, is going to America. You wrote to Julia Child.

Annabel Langbein:

She didn't reply, but her husband did. It was so nice. I think it had been my mother who said, "Why don't you write to Julia Child?" She had always been a big thing in our house, so I wrote to her and said, "I'm crazy about food." I had started writing for the Listener, I had this catering business, I was doing food styling, but I just didn't know where I could take it, and I didn't want to be a chef…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details