The most surprising example of this, for me, was finding out that Damien Hirst’s pharmaceuticals were all hand made and hand painted.
Actual pills would rot too quickly — which makes sense as they are digestible, and therefore in the same category as food, ish — so he had a team of assistants making caplets, tablets, lozenges, pills etc. in a studio out of resin and plastic.
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One of those things that seems so obvious now, but at the time I had assumed he was just displaying existing medicines in ironic packaging.
A fun corollary to this is the various “food” products that exist only for the camera to consume. Most of the ice cream you’ve seen in movies is actually mashed potatoes since ice cream won’t survive under the hot lights of a movie set. Most of the milk you’ve seen in pictures of cereal is actually glue, etc…