When I'm not actually cooking, I'm reading about recipes and looking at photographs of pasta, chicken, steak, vegetables, and all the food I like to eat. I thought I knew what those things look like, but now I'm not so sure.
Caren Alpert, a San Francisco-based photographer, makes her living shooting food. Most of the time she traffics in recognizable images, but lately she's been using a scanning electron microscope to capture close-ups of common foodstuffs—table salt, chocolate cake, cauliflower—and the results are spectacular, and completely eye-opening. Those are her cake sprinkles, above. See what I mean?
Alpert has a show at the James Beard Foundation in November and December, and you can learn more about her remarkable work at her website, here.