Comment by kstrauser
3 days ago
Other than bakery items, what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color? I don't see how that's anything other than a marketing tool to make them stand out on store shelves. When you order something in a restaurant, you typically don't even know what their version will look like until it gets to your table. I've never, not once, added dyes to home cooking outside of cake icings and things like that.
There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?
> what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color?
Probably all of them. We are super sensitive to colors.
Red meat and fish like tuna and salmon have carbon monoxide and sodium nitrate treatment just to keep them red because that's how people think they can judge quality.
> Consumers will pay up to $1 per pound more for darker colored salmon compared to salmon with lighter hues, according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry.
> according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry
Seriously?
Alternatively, if we stopped dyeing fish, a year later people will have totally recalibrated what they think fresh, healthy fish looks like.
Only for farmed salmon.
Wild salmon eat krill and other smaller organisms, many of which provide the components to turn the salmon meat a shade of pink.
Farmed salmon don't get the same components in their feed, so their meat isn't the same colour. So the farmers add some of those components into the salmon feed, et voila - pink salmon meat.
see https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...
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Cheese
Tuna
Pickles
Oranges (apples as well, but I can't find an old article)
Wasabi
Apricots
Ginger
Salmon
https://www.treehugger.com/foods-youd-never-guess-were-artif...
Don't forget red meat either.
In many cases[0][1][2] it's treated with carbon monoxide to make it look redder.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5848116/
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3801706&page=1
[2] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2005/11/17/FDA-ask...
Cheetos, skittles, Froot Loops, Gatorade, salsa, salad dressing
To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Would a Cheeto by any other color taste as savory?”
Very off-topic but I can't wait to read in the news about some kids school report about Shakespeare being written by some LLM which has training data that includes this quote ;)
Those are dyed, but they don't depend on the dye for nutrition or taste. Wasabi isn't less delicious if it's a lighter or different hue.
The saying goes you eat with your eyes. These things depend on dye as they rot on the shelf otherwise.
A paper on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
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