What the American test kitchen doesn’t want you to know

While anyone who has worked in a kitchen knows that a chef’s hands are often burned, cut, scraped or otherwise terrorized by the dangers of cooking, the public has different expectations of on-air talent. They don’t want to see messy hands around food.

When The Wall Street Journal spoke to professional hand model Alvin Zhou, who has worked on extremely popular online cooking videos, he said, “We get comments about our hands all the time.”

At America’s Test Kitchen, special hand models handle the close-up photography for cookbooks and video segments. As reported by CBS Sunday Morning, hand model for ATK Dan Cellucci says, “Yeah, I mean, I get a call every now and then: ‘Do you mind just getting a manicure?'”

Two more food talent interviewees from The Wall Street Journal support this claim. Vaughn Vreeland, who used to work at Lekker and is now at The New York Times, says he got a $20 manicure before his job interview at Lekker, and Tara Maini, who lives in Britain, says “she gets biweekly manicures and expenses them to her company.”