Julia Roberts, Asparagus and Eat Pray Love

Eat Pray Love's food stylist Susan Spungen turned Rome upsidedown looking for asparagus.

By now, you’ve seen Julia Roberts having a relationship with her pizza in previews for Eat Pray Love. For the film’s stellar food stylist, and frequent F&W contributor, Susan Spungen, that pizza scene was relatively easy—she didn’t have to make it; the Naples pizzeria L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele did that job. Still, Spungen prepared most of the rest of the film’s onscreen food. Her biggest challenge: asparagus. In the movie, Roberts’s character goes shopping at Rome’s Campo de Fiore food market for asparagus for an indulgent lunch for one. In reality, since they were filming in August, Spungen couldn’t find any asparagus at the market. She went all over Rome before she was able to finally locate some. “I literally got the only four bunches of asparagus in all of Rome. They were scraggly and curvy, but they worked.” Well enough that, after shooting the scene, Roberts said to her, “good asparagus.”

For more on what it’s like to style food for movies, opentable.com has a great interview with Spungen.