equipment recommendation - What lenses are best for food photography?

What lenses are best for taking photos of cooked dishes?

In some articles, I have read that I can have great results with lenses f/1.4 because they are cheap and they give that nice blurred background.

Others have great result with macro lens, but these are quite more expensive.

How different the results would look?

Would the ones with macro lens look so much more professional that I should not even consider the f/1.4 ones?

Are macro lenses good only for very close distances? What the maximum distance away from the dish that it can be? Is it good only for cropped images?

_{edit: I rephrased my question to make it more clear.}

Answer

As a point to consider - recently, CreativeLIVE had a weekend workshop on food photography w/ famous photog Penny De-Los Santos. She used mainly the 24-105mm f4L and 70-200mm f/2.8 on an EOS 5DmkII (full frame) camera during the workshop. You can see the full gear list here.

That said, when shooting food the studio style, you have control on most of the parameters. If shooting with a long lens from a relatively close range, then your DoF will be shallow even with moderately fast apertures (i.e., you don't have to go all the way down to f/1.4 or f/2.8 to frame a bowl of soup nicely).

Update: "Are macro lenses good only for very close distances? What the maximum distance away from the dish that it can be? Is it good only for cropped images?"

Macro lenses are usually good wherever their non-macro parallels are useful. You just get, in addition, the ability to get really close to the subject for some 1:1 magnification. Their maximum focusing distance (MFD) is infinity (except for some very specialized macros). I can't imagine a special need for macro when shooting a whole dish, but it can get useful if you want to shoot seeds, crumbs or other very small food elements.