Ever consider the color tricks food manufacturers use to get you to buy their foods?
Leanne from
A Life Filled With Colour ran into this issue with a bag of potatoes. Opposite hues on the color wheel basically cancel each other out, creating a neutral color. Wrapped, unripe, green potatoes in pink plastic bags essentially look brown through the plastic...until you get home and realize you've been tricked.
Take meat counters, for another example. They are often lit with red lights to make the meat look fresh and "healthy". No-one wants to buy grayish meat, right?
Notice all the red banners above the meat counter? All very calculated to push the message of fresh raw meat, while creating a warm glow over the products.
Wild salmon derive their color from the krill they eat in the ocean. With their artificial diet, farmed salmon are normally a dull gray color. Other fish are naturally gray, but for whatever reason, consumers expect their salmon to be pink, pink, pink.
The industry says the research suggests that people may be willing to pay a higher price for a salmon of the 'right' hue.(source) Get this: the producers of the dye even have a color fan deck for fish manufacturers to select from, like a paint fan deck. Pink dye is added to the salmon's processed food pellets for the desired effect. It's called a SalmoFan. I'm not even kidding!
FYI, the
Monterey Bay Aquarium offers a handy free pocket-sized
guide on purchasing seafood.
But wait, there's more. Think your egg yolks, all a lovely consistent golden yellow color, are left up to nature? Think again.
I give you, the
DSM Yolk colour fan deck, for "
reliable measurement of reproducible yolk colour" After determining the desired yolk color, manufacturers feed birds the required amount of a nutritional supplement, and voila, lovely yellow pigment.
I feel so manipulated!
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