We take for granted the color of our food as natural—as natural as the sky is blue. But in Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat, Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.” Here she discusses some of the colors we have come to expect our food to be.
Few realize how capitalism has altered people’s sensory experience. Over the past century, business has created an entirely new sensory world, ranging from fragrances for cosmetics and toiletries to the smell of “fresh” air, and the sound of ocean waves and birdsong. Artificial worlds have become real worlds. This is dramatically the case in foods. In today’s color-saturated environment, the color of food is something many people take for granted. In reality, color is the product of political, social, and economic negotiations among various agents, including food processors, agricultural producers, grocers, packaging manufacturers, legislators, and consumers.
Yellow Butter
The shade of butter depends on the kind of cattle feed, the breed of cows, and the period of lactation. During the summer months, especially from late May to June, when cows are fed on green pasture, rich in yellow pigments called carotene and xanthophyll, the color of butter is bright yellow. In autumn and winter, when the pastures begin to dry up and cows are primarily fed on dry roughage and grains, butter becomes faintly yellow.
Dairy producers in Europe and in the United States had traditionally created a rich yellow color of butter by feeding carrots and other yellow substances to cows, especially during winter (at least since the fourteenth century). They also colored butter and cheese with carrot juice and extracts of plant seeds, called annatto, to give them a “natural” yellow all year round. Beginning in the 1870s, dye manufacturers, including the Christopher Hansen’s Laboratory Company and Wells, Richardson & Company, even introduced food dyes prepared specifically for coloring butter, called “butter colors.”
Pink Salmon
Like the color of foods, feeding animals with some kind of coloring sources has been common practices in the food industry. The federal government legalized the use of dried algae for chicken feed to enhance the yellow color of chicken skin and egg yolk in 1961. Today, feeds for farmed salmon commonly are mixed with red color additives to make the fish’s meat “salmon pink” because farmed salmon looks grayish when the color is not controlled (wild salmon has pinkish meat).
“Orange” Oranges?
The color orange is named after, well, oranges. But the actual fruit does not look always orange. Certain varieties grown in Florida ripen without a change in skin color due to the warm climate. In California—Florida’s major competitor—oranges generally assume more uniform and brighter color than Florida fruits due to different climate conditions. In the early 1930s, Florida citrus growers began coloring orange skins with synthetic dyes to “match” the rind color with the taste of the fruit (and consumers’ expectations about the color of ripe oranges). By the 1940s, the color-add process had been widely adopted in Florida. During the 1946-47 season, 21 million out of 30 million boxes of fresh oranges shipped out of the state were colored with synthetic dyes. As Florida oranges were used increasingly for frozen orange concentrate after World War II, the amounts of fresh oranges shipped from the state decreased. Today, about 90 percent of Florida citrus is processed into juice or canned.
Red Meat
Maintaining an attractive “natural” color was an important marketing factor also in transforming animal flesh into standardized commodities. Selling fresh meat was particularly challenging for food retailers when they sought to adopt self-service operation in the mid-twentieth century. To keep the red color of meat and to prevent mold, the amount of oxygen and humidity had to be controlled carefully. It was not until 1946 that chemical company DuPont introduced cellophane effective for wrapping self-service meat, sufficient to keep bright red color.
Lighting was also important for keeping and presenting the fresh color of meat in supermarkets. General Electric introduced fluorescent lights for commercial use in 1938. Until then, grocers had used incandescent tungsten blubs, which tended to darken the color of perishable foods with their heat. GE recommended its “deluxe cool white” light for meat display in the early 1950s. It contained a pinkish shade and emphasized warm colors, including pink and red colors of meat products. Red neon signs above display cases in the meat department also made meat look fresh red. These illuminating signs distributed red light, mixed with other white lighting in the store, and kept the “fresh” look of all meat products.
White Bread
White bread used to symbolize scientific progress and modernity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Those who promoted diet reform, including Sylvester Graham, insisted on the nutritional value of brown bread from the 1830s onwards. But many professional bakers, millers, and nutritionists asserted that pure white bread was nutritionally superior. With the rise of counterculture movements, consumer activism, and environmentalism that denounced materialism and conformity in the 1960s, the visual impact of white bread spurred increasingly negative reactions. Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland once noted in the 1960s: “People who eat white bread have no dreams.” Instead, brown bread became a symbol of naturalness and authenticity.
Pink Drinks
Cochineal dye—one of the most popular food colorings among professional chefs and housewives in the late nineteenth century—became a source of controversy in the twenty-first century. In April 2012, the global coffee chain Starbucks announced that the firm would stop using cochineal dye for its Strawberry and Crème Frappuccino, and other strawberry-flavored drinks and pastries, sold in the United States. The news was covered widely in a number of media, which often characterized the use of cochineal as disgusting and offensive by calling the dye “crushed bug” and “beetle juice.” The firm later announced that they would replace cochineal with tomato-based lycopene coloring. Many consumers generally considered the use of natural dyes permissible even when the color did not come from the food colored (i.e., coloring strawberry-based drinks with dye extracted from tomatoes).
The swift response of Starbucks to the criticism against cochineal, as well as its prior shift from artificial to natural colors, represents not only the firm’s strong concern over food colorings, as well as its corporate image in general, but also a larger trend in the food industry today. Over the last decade, an increasing number of food manufacturers have been turning to natural colors while discarding chemically synthesized artificial dyes. In 2015 alone, companies, including Hershey, Nestlé USA, Kraft, and General Mills, announced plans to replace the synthetic dyes added to some of their products with natural ones (General Mills went back to using synthetic dyes a year later when some consumers complained about a “dull” color of breakfast cereals colored with natural dyes).
The management of color in the food industry is a crucial element in a far broader story of how business has altered people’s sensory experience. This was a creation of new “natural” through artificial means.
