Are Fancy Meals Art or Edible?

You are sitting at your table in a restaurant. Your meal comes.

There it is: At the corner of the plate is a ball of mashed potatoes, there are peas implanted here and there. Very pretty. Next to that is group of radishes and carrots interspersed like a deck of cards. On one end is a green pepper cut length-wise and filled with a shrimp and dressing dollop.
Three trees of parsley stick out of this like a forest.

The center is a medallion of a piece of meat, surrounded by 12 olives with pimientos, all of them pierced by different colored toothpicks.

Looking at all this, the question arises: How many different hands and fingers arranged all this on the plate?

(letter published in The Maui News Nov. 12, 2011 and Lahaina News Nov.17, 2011)