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Blue Food Packaging & Blue Food

Aren't they mostly red, orange and green?

It's from a Spitting Image sketch where Thatcher and her Cabinet have lunch.
She orders a steak, and the waiter asks 'What about the vegetables?'
Thatcher glances at the company and replies 'They’ll have the same.'

The monochrome scenes were of John Major.
 
We have an orange President.
 
After years of work, researchers have identified a natural compound that provides a blue coloring for edibles that can be produced in commercial quantities. If further safety research goes well it will be possible to have blue foods without having to rely on completely synthetic dyes.
Scientists Finally Isolated a Blue Food Coloring That's Entirely Natural

Scientists have isolated and harnessed that rarest of things – an organic blue food coloring found in nature – and figured out a way to produce it at scale.

The discovery, made by an international team of scientists working across different fields, means that for the first time blue and other-colored foods may not have to rely upon synthetic dyes to give them their vibrant hue.

"Blue colors are really quite rare in nature – a lot of them are really reds and purples," says biophysics researcher Pamela Denish ...

While it's probably not something most people spend much time thinking about, the fact remains that the majority of blue-colored foods, medicines, and cosmetics are the result of two widely used artificial colorings, known as FD&C Blue No. 1 (aka 'brilliant blue') and FD&C Blue No. 2 (aka 'indigotine'). ...

"Despite a long history of exploration, blue remains one of the most challenging colorants to obtain from any source and even more so from natural, edible sources," Denish and her co-authors explain in their new paper. ...

In the new research – a collaboration roughly a decade in the making – the researchers isolated a naturally occurring blue dye called an anthocyanin in red cabbage. ...

While exhaustive safety testing will need to be conducted before we'll be eating anything like that ourselves made from this red cabbage derivative ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/newly-...could-mean-an-end-to-synthetic-food-colorings

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/15/eabe7871
 
After years of work, researchers have identified a natural compound that provides a blue coloring for edibles that can be produced in commercial quantities. If further safety research goes well it will be possible to have blue foods without having to rely on completely synthetic dyes.


FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/newly-...could-mean-an-end-to-synthetic-food-colorings

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/15/eabe7871
I find blue food most unappealing
 
I remember a trip to the cinema in Cambridge, and I bought a blue Slush Puppie before going in. One of my friends remarked with incredulity, 'look - he's eating something that's blue' - like it was a big deal or something.
 
I thought I remembered reading somewhere that sugar was packed in blue bags back in Victorian times as the colour repelled flies. I might have imagined it as I can’t find any reference to it now. It also sounds unlikely. But apparently now blue is seen as a fantastic packaging colour as it implies all sorts of positive things according to this packaging company https://www.bizongo.com/blog/packaging-color-psychology
 
I find blue food most unappealing
Yup, it's one of those evolutionary warning signs indicating unwholesomeness. Like mould.

So why would anyone need to dye food blue? :chuckle:

Red foods on t'other'and are generally considered salubrious. Even though they were traditionally dyed with crushed cochineal beetles.
 
Yup, it's one of those evolutionary warning signs indicating unwholesomeness. Like mould.

So why would anyone need to dye food blue? :chuckle:

Red foods on t'other'and are generally considered salubrious. Even though they were traditionally dyed with crushed cochineal beetles.
I remember when i was a kid, for one of my birthdays mom made a batch of multi coloured biscuits, pink, orange, yellow, green and blue, they all tasted exactly the same but nobody touched the blue or green ones.
 
Barilla pasta (Italy's favourite I believe) has always come in a blue packaging.

Years ago, when spaghetti was an exotic import, to be acquired from the delicatessen in two-foot lengths, the standard packaging for several brands, I think, was dark blue paper. A small label would identify the maker etc.

I am now all nostalgic for two-foot long spaghetti*. I'm sure it is still around but it's ages since I saw any in workaday supermarkets here. :omr:

I think the shorter, easier-to-handle lengths took over in the eighties.

And do they still wrap oranges in tissue paper? Maybe it is regarded as wasteful now.

*I have just remembered that I don't eat wheat! I don't see any gluten-free long-style versions, alas!
 
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Years ago, when spaghetti was an exotic import, to be acquired from the delicatessen in two-foot lengths, the standard packaging for several brands, I think, was dark blue paper. A small label would identify the maker etc.

I am now all nostalgic for two-foot long spaghetti*. I'm sure it is still around but it's ages since I saw any in workaday supermarkets here. :omr:

I think the shorter, easier-to-handle lengths took over in the eighties.

*I have just remembered that I don't eat wheat! I don't see any gluten-free long-style versions, alas!

Yes! My parents used to have a spaghetti jar in the kitchen for the 2ft long variety, when spaghetti and macaroni were practically the only pasta you could buy.
 
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Years ago, when spaghetti was an exotic import, to be acquired from the delicatessen in two-foot lengths, the standard packaging for several brands, I think, was dark blue paper. A small label would identify the maker etc.

I am now all nostalgic for two-foot long spaghetti*. I'm sure it is still around but it's ages since I saw any in workaday supermarkets here. :omr:

I think the shorter, easier-to-handle lengths took over in the eighties.

And do they still wrap oranges in tissue paper? Maybe it is regarded as wasteful now.

*I have just remembered that I don't eat wheat! I don't see any gluten-free long-style versions, alas!

Ah, the good old days.


See:
The Bumper Swiss Spaghetti Harvest of 1957
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-bumper-swiss-spaghetti-harvest-of-1957.9301/
 
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And do they still wrap oranges in tissue paper? Maybe it is regarded as wasteful now.
Satsuma/clementines etc usually have a small number of wrapped fruits in a crate, carbon copy looking stuff, not sure why but about 6 or so per box are wrapped.
 
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Years ago, when spaghetti was an exotic import, to be acquired from the delicatessen in two-foot lengths, the standard packaging for several brands, I think, was dark blue paper. A small label would identify the maker etc.

I am now all nostalgic for two-foot long spaghetti*. I'm sure it is still around but it's ages since I saw any in workaday supermarkets here. :omr:

I think the shorter, easier-to-handle lengths took over in the eighties.

And do they still wrap oranges in tissue paper? Maybe it is regarded as wasteful now.

*I have just remembered that I don't eat wheat! I don't see any gluten-free long-style versions, alas!
I don't remember long spaghetti at all but a quick Google shows it is still available, usually in 20/20.5/21inch lengths, which I'm guessing are just different translations of 50cm; according to Ocado/Garofalo spaghetti typically used to be made in 50cm lengths until the latter half of the 20th century, which is what you remember (but I don't...).
 
Tasting With Our Eyes: Why Bright Blue Chicken Looks So Strange

A photographer who plays with food color expectations.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesal...eyes-why-bright-blue-chicken-looks-so-strange

BlueChicken.jpg

And a bonus tongue twister: "Bright blue Brats"
 
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