EATING WITH YOUR EYES

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33479, 9 March 1974, Page 11

EATING WITH YOUR EYES

i By

DAVID GUNSTON)

The diners were expectantly hungry as they sat down at the long table. But the menu was rather unusual, to say the least. Purple tomato juice, followed by dark gre\ scrambled eggs served on turquoise toast with dark blue mashed potatoes, bright yellow bread rolls and pale blue butter. This was followed by bright green mashed banana with black custard. The diners’ appetites swiftly evaporated, and although they tried hard, none could finish the meal. Several felt quite sick. So the management promised to replace the food — although this time the meal was served in total darkness, Everyone found it quite palatable, and managed to eat it all. When the lights were put on again, everyone was told that the menu was exactly the same — ordinary wholesome food densely dyed with harmless and quite tasteless colourings. None of this was really surprising, for the whole thing took place at Montreal University, Canada, as part of a research programme into how colour affects our liking for food. It proved one point most vividly: that we eat primarily with our eyes, not with our tastebuds. It was the unorthodox and unpleasant colourings of normal food that affected the eaters’ opinion of their taste.

Among the many things discovered were that foods tinted grey, black, and any shade of blue, dark purple and also very vivid yellow are generally considered offputting. This is partly be-

cause such colours are rarely found in natural foodstuffs, partly because th* eye and brain cannot bring themselves to associate such colours with appetising fare. Red prune* For instance, part of the universal unpopularity of prunes lies in their black external colour and deep brown insides. If they were, say, red or orange, we would enjoy them more. Also, blue is the one colour in food that no one relishes. I o o d manufacturers learned long ago that colour is an important in good marketing, as flavour, quality and price. Green foods are not very popular, either, unless it is their natural colour, as in fgetables. Again, this is partly because green vegetables and salads have natural colours, whereas an iced cake or en omelette served green would have to be coloured with a dye very hard to mix to any natural green we know and appreciate. People also expect many of the things they eat to look not only appetising in the right colours, but where possible, more colourful than real life. Good examples of this are bottled orange squashes and soft drinks that are invariably dyed not the insipid greyish-orange shade of real untouched orange juice, but the bright sunny shade of the inedible outside peel of the fruit. If a housewife makes home-made jam from say strawberries or cherries, she accepts that the result will come out a rather brownish shade far removed from the external colour of the fresh fruit used. But in the food store, no housewife would buy jam of such drab colour, so manufacturers pep up their products with permitted red dyes obtained chemically that are in the end far removed from the original burnished tints of nature.

Orange* for iiralth Orange and gold suggest sunshine and therefore health and vitality, while good red colours always attract the human eye, so food firms colour to their products accordingly. Even things like fish fingers and sausages are often artifically tinted to conform with what manufat • turers think their customers expect to find attractive and appetising in a store — not what nature intended such things to look like. The same is true of food packaging Food items packed in dense purple tend to gather dust on their shelves. Packets coloured black are widely avoided, while care has to be taken with blues and greens too. Apart fro mputting many people off, such packages tend to look smaller in comparison with those of the same size but printed in red, orange and yellow Children tend to g straight for foods coloured bright red or pink, but as they grow up they move more towards those lovely golden-looking things. But yellow is not always an easy colour to dabble with, either. Rich eggy mayonnaise yellow makes some people feel sick, and many airlines will not serve meals containing this shade to reduce the chances of passengers developing sickness Colour is indeed ihi strongest single outside influence in our lives — anc never more so than whei we eat.