Color my food

I used to be a fan of McDonald’s St. Patrick’s Day milkshakes as a lad growing up in Massachusetts. I’m not sure if the McDonald’s corporation rolled out green milkshakes all across America back then, but in Irish-heavy Massachusetts, it was an annual event: you’d ask for the special shake and walk around, obviously enjoying the weirdness of sucking down thick, green sludge through a straw in front of all your friends. Even as a kid, I knew green food wasn’t right. But that was part of the fun.

Well, it stopped being fun when I noticed it had turned my stool green. Even as a kid, I knew green stool… just wasn’t right.

There are people in the US government now who would like to do away with green food, and orange food, and all the other rainbow varieties of food that come us to courtesy of petroleum-based food dyes. It makes sense: Why ingest artificial food coloring just so that, psychologically, you can better enjoy Pringles or Strawberry Twizzlers or Cheetos Crunchy Cheese snacks? Why subject kids to weird chemicals obtained from decomposed prehistoric animals just so their Gummi worms will be available in shades not naturally found on Earth?

According to the New York Times, a US advocacy group called The Center for Science in the Public Interest wants to see all artificial food dyes banned, arguing that rich, vibrant colors tend to encourage kids to eat more junk food.

It’s a strange reason for banning food coloring. It’s like saying if manufacturers dyed their cigarettes the color of diseased lungs, people would stop buying them. Color is not really the issue. It’s more likely the addictive fat and brain-spinning amounts of sugar in junk food that causes kids to go all wacko under its influence.

But color does have an effect on us, psychologically. I’ve written about Filipino food before, in an article titled “I’m Dreaming of a Brown Christmas.” I noted back then that a lot of Filipino foods tend to exist in a curiously limited color spectrum, somewhere in the neighborhood of… brown. Adobo, lengua, lechon, kaldereta, chocolaté eh: you get the idea. The liberal use of soy sauce in so many regional dishes adds to this monochromatic mania.

But this has got me thinking. Could it be that, for Filipinos, food that is brown, and only brown, eventually became equated with deliciousness? Maybe single-color food is not such a bad idea after all.

In futuristic TV shows from the ‘60s like Lost in Space and The Jetsons, food came out in little gray squares. The TV space cadets didn’t seem to care; they ate it down like it was foie gras and lobster tails. Even the food tubes consumed by the space explorers in 2001: A Space Odyssey resembled those little condiment packs given away at fast-food drive-through windows. No doubt it was uniformly colorless because in the future, we are led to believe, humans will have evolved past their primal need for orange-colored Cheetos and purple Jell-O. (As if those astronauts in 2001 needed another reason to kill themselves out of boredom besides bland-colored food.)

But then again, in other sci-fi movies, monochromatic food is revealed to be a Very Bad Thing Indeed. Need I say more, other than to remind you all, once again, that “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!” Yes, those little crackers in Soylent Green were kind of unpleasant to look at, and had unfortunate ingredients, but they were really not so bad with a bit of Cheese Whiz squirted on ‘em.

Anyway, The Center for Science in the Public Interest didn’t get its wish: food dyes were studied once more by the US government and found to pose no hazard, chemically or aesthetically, to consumers. The government probably also had to weigh the crippling effect on the US economy if people were suddenly reduced to buying Ben & Jerry Ice Cream in its new, only government-approved flavor: Slushy Gray. 

It’s true, we humans could conceivably grow used to colorless food. But it’s unlikely we would extract much joy from eating it. They even spent US government money to figure this out. A study cited in the Times article noted that Cheetos, deprived of FD&C Yellow No. 6, “look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect.” Gummi worms without artificial food dyes look like “muddily translucent worms,” while Jell-O sans dye no longer looks day-glo green or lava lamp red but all turns out a watery tan. Ho-hum.

“Color can actually override the other parts of the eating experience,” notes food chemist Kantha Shelke in the Times article. Just as lab-designed taste additives account for the eerie simulation of “flavor” that we experience while chomping down a Big Mac, artificial food coloring often adds to our culinary enjoyment of a meal. Well, duh!

“Color is such a crucial part of the eating experience that banning dyes would take much of the pleasure out of life,” concludes Shelke.

I’m not sure I would go that far. But let’s face it: eating with pleasure is a Filipino birth rite. So whether it’s brown adobo, purple ube or rainbow-infused halo-halo, the Filipino need for colorful food will continue to assert itself. So eat, drink and be merry; for tomorrow, we may still dye.