What do you think is the best way to fry a human leg? Is veal or pork closest to human flesh? Where does one source fingers? How will beef, lamb or goat organs look – or not – on screen? Too dark and bloody? Not bloody enough? Is there such a thing, in the real world, as an edible snail shell? If a lobster were to hatch, would it be from a cantaloupe?

Enter Janice Poon, artist and food stylist for Sony Pictures Television’s original series, Hannibal, starring Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter and Gillian Anderson as his psychiatrist Bedelia Du Maurier. Season three, which opens with the two on the run in Europe, premieres on AXN in Asia on 5 June in prime-time slots across the region.

Across three seasons, Poon has found answers to questions she never dreamed she would ever ask or be asked, never mind have to answer.

“It’s not just ‘oh, fry the leg’,” she says. “A leg would be very tough. There’s not a lot of fat on it. If you were in a position to cook a leg, you would want to slow cook it,” she says.

Her job, she says, “is to help actors say their lines in a way that is meaningful. If the food somehow snaps them out of character or it doesn’t seem right, then I have messed up”.

Poon uses pork a lot, because it’s light and closest to viewers’ perception of what human flesh looks like. “There’s a perception that human flesh (because it’s never meat, only flesh) is like veal and pale, even though it isn’t really,” she says. “Most human muscles are slow twitch compared to quick twitch, which means dark meat rather than light meat,” Poon adds. She describes pig organs as “lovely and pink and fresh”, compared to beef, lamb or goat, which are “bloody, purple and blotchy”. And, clearly, not nearly as cinematically desirable.

Her choice of ingredients “goes back to what I’m aiming for with Hannibal’s food – that it be lovely and you think ‘that’s so pretty and attractive. You know it’s not right but it’s appealing so that gives you that sense of unease”.

All the dishes on Hannibal’s table have to be “innovative and cinematic with lots of subtext,” Poon says. “The show is so well known for the subtext, layers and layers of meaning and we are lucky to have fans who like to delve into that and get to the bottom of the references,” she adds.

If she can’t get hold of what she needs for real, such as, for instance, tiny birds that would be illegal to kill and cook, she has to fake it – edibly. Marzipan modelling is always a good option.

“I have to think of what the actors can eat, and give them something that isn’t over spiced, that they aren’t going to have to chew. All of that has to get factored in,” she says.

Every item on the table is deeply rooted in the script. “It’s very much like when you are writing, every word has to have a reason to be there. So it is with the food. It needs to inform the viewer about Hannibal, about how he feels about who he is sharing the meal with, who is eating and being eaten.”

The hardest thing Poon has ever had to do on set is in the second half of the new season. It’s dinner and the script calls for something grey and unappetising. “That’s the hardest thing for me to do – make it hideous”.