Other than bakery items, what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color? I don't see how that's anything other than a marketing tool to make them stand out on store shelves. When you order something in a restaurant, you typically don't even know what their version will look like until it gets to your table. I've never, not once, added dyes to home cooking outside of cake icings and things like that.

There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?

Cheese

Tuna

Pickles

Oranges (apples as well, but I can't find an old article)

Wasabi

Apricots

Ginger

Salmon

https://www.treehugger.com/foods-youd-never-guess-were-artif...

Cheetos, skittles, Froot Loops, Gatorade, salsa, salad dressing

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Would a Cheeto by any other color taste as savory?”

Very off-topic but I can't wait to read in the news about some kids school report about Shakespeare being written by some LLM which has training data that includes this quote ;)

Those are dyed, but they don't depend on the dye for nutrition or taste. Wasabi isn't less delicious if it's a lighter or different hue.

The saying goes you eat with your eyes. These things depend on dye as they rot on the shelf otherwise.

A paper on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...

I mean … the pickled ginger served by my local Japanese sushi place is … well, the color of ginger (same shade as like a ginger beer) and it tastes fine to me?

They rot on the shelves ... when competitors can make their alternatives more flamboyant to stand out. Not if everyone stops needlessly coloring those foods.

Don't forget red meat either.

In many cases[0][1][2] it's treated with carbon monoxide to make it look redder.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5848116/

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3801706&page=1

[2] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2005/11/17/FDA-ask...

> what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color?

Probably all of them. We are super sensitive to colors.

Red meat and fish like tuna and salmon have carbon monoxide and sodium nitrate treatment just to keep them red because that's how people think they can judge quality.

> Consumers will pay up to $1 per pound more for darker colored salmon compared to salmon with lighter hues, according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry.

> according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry

Seriously?

Alternatively, if we stopped dyeing fish, a year later people will have totally recalibrated what they think fresh, healthy fish looks like.

Only for farmed salmon.

Wild salmon eat krill and other smaller organisms, many of which provide the components to turn the salmon meat a shade of pink.

Farmed salmon don't get the same components in their feed, so their meat isn't the same colour. So the farmers add some of those components into the salmon feed, et voila - pink salmon meat.

see https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...

We feed chickens, Merigold flowers to make their yolks darker

Nope, eating nothing but potatoes for the rest of your life is a fantastic way to ensure that you end up with severe macro/micronutrient deficiencies, which will be a very effective way of generating disease, including cancer.

> Hyperbole.

> 1. A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.

> 2. A figure of speech in which the expression is an evident exaggeration of the meaning intended to be conveyed, or by which things are represented as much greater or less, better or worse, than they really are; a statement exaggerated fancifully, through excitement, or for effect.

> 3. Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device.

From DuckDuckGo, quoting Wordnik, quoting The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

>We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.

I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.

In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.

Yup, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of dyes one could use to get red that are completely harmless. Although they may be more expensive, I have no clue.

For fun, you could grow your own seasoning (besides herbs, easy too) for those potatoes. I recently learned about the plant Salicornia - you can dehydrate them and grind them to make a green salt. I'm going to try to grow some this year.