"Julie & Julia," a new film opening Friday, features three main characters: Meryl Streep as famed cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child, Amy Adams as blogger Julie Powell — and the food.

Responsible for the "performance" of the third was culinary consultant Susan Spungen.

Spungen, a chef and cookbook author ("Recipes: A Collection for the Modern Cook," 2006) who worked for 12 years as food editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine, had considerable experience in shooting food for print. But styling food for a movie, and especially for a movie like this, where cooking is a focus of the story, was "a very, very different thing," she said in an interview from her Long Island, N.Y., home.

The film is a marriage of two books, skillfully executed by award-winning screenwriter Nora Ephron: Child's biography of her early years in Paris and her discovery of French cuisine, "My Life in France"; and Powell's 2005 account of spending a year preparing all 524 recipes in Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," the best-selling "Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously."

For print, food shots are generally "very up close and personal. The size of a raspberry matters. Everything has to be perfect and unblemished. The composition on the plate is important," Spungen said.

For film, and particularly for this one, the shots are wider and they're moving and there are people interacting with the dishes. While the stylist might prepare two or three versions of a dish for print, for a film, dozens of the dish are made. They made 25 chocolate cakes for one particularly gorgeous scene. When Streep, as Child, has to flip and hilariously attempt to repair a potato cake, many versions were prepped at different stages of the recipe. But, in the end, Streep worked with just one on every take, because it gave the most authentic look — something of a puffy, golden mess.

A film is not a cooking show, so the food has to serve the plotline, rather than be the subject of the story.

In this case, though Child and Powell are cooks, the story is really one of finding your passion, the pursuit that can fulfill your life along with your relationships. (It's also a rather delicious love story, illustrating how both couples interact and support each other, and how each man relishes his wife's cooking. But Spungen spurns the moniker "chick flick," arguing that the men play an important role, as do the careers of the two women.)

Spungen's first job was to meet with Ephron, to decide which recipes they would feature. "I was quite nervous because I hadn't met her yet and I had to think on my feet. I made suggestions and brought visual references, examples of how certain dishes might look. We wanted all the food to look delicious and inviting. So we weren't going to do things like veal kidneys, even if that's what she would really serve."

It helped, said Spungen, that Ephron "really knows a lot about food, where to eat, where to get this and that. I think of her as the Woody Allen of food."

Just as a film is not a cooking show, actors are not chefs. So the stylists and food experts on set — Spungen partnered with chef Colin Flynn — had to educate the actors about how to handle ingredients professionally. Spungen, in an entry on the film's Web site, tells of helping Adams to gain a level of comfort "with a large, sharp knife" and teaching everyone how to bone a duck, a challenge Powell had dreaded and put off to the very end of her adventure.

In general, Spungen said, because the camera is moving quickly across the scene, with film, "it's more about making an overall impression, it's about communicating the deliciousness of a dish through the details." So a scene in which Powell, a disillusioned government worker who loves to cook, makes bruschetta for her husband (Chris Messina) offers quick but exceptionally tempting glances of invitingly golden slices of toast, cherry tomatoes glistening crimson on a cutting board, the two biting into the finished appetizer of tomatoes, herbs and olive oil piled atop ovals of crisp bread.

There is a great deal of eating with relish in this film. At a Honolulu preview last month, foodies left hungry for something other than movie theater popcorn.

Hearing this, Spungen laughed, saying, "Then we did our job."