Americans’ Bizarre Relationship With the Color of Their Food

There are many parts of the world where, for much of human history, food was likely a dull visual affair. Take Tuscany, the culinarily renowned region of Italy that the writer Bill Buford muses on in his book about cooking, Heat. He details a near-monochrome local cuisine that has been passed down through the generations: Crostini with chicken-liver paté? Brown. Beans? Brown. Roasted pork, veal, sausage? Brown, brown, brown. Even the vegetables: Buford classifies Tuscan artichokes and olives as "green-brown," and more amusingly, the porcini mushrooms as "brown-brown."

Over the past 150 years, food companies and marketers in other parts of the world have taken eating in a more visually thrilling (if a little disorienting) direction. They have used dyes to alter mass-produced foods—sometimes to make them less “natural”-looking (see: cakes with bright-blue icing), sometimes to make them more “natural”-looking (pickles made greener to fit with consumers’ expectations). Both intentions are, upon further inspection, sort of strange. The first one is odd because it’s not entirely clear, , why anything with