Blue Frosting and the Survival of the Fittest

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Blue Frosting and the Survival of the Fittest

by Cecily Marbach Oberstein · March 16th, 2009

post dedicated to Ezra Marbach

When I think of March 17^th I think of green. Not olive green, celadon, pine or lime — I’m talking clover. On St. Patrick’s Day in the US you can find things such as bagels, pastries, beer, and flowers dyed clover green in celebration of this day. It’s meant as a shout out to Irish American solidarity and pride much like the blue coloring used on cupcakes is for the celebration of Israel’s Independence Day. (I just had to bring up those blue cupcakes, regrettably they hold a special place in my culinary heart.) With all of these thoughts on green and blue I thought I’d explore the connection between food and color.

In Oliver Sacks’s novel An Anthropologist on Mars he includes a chapter called The Case of the Colorblind Painter. This chapter tells the story of an adult artist who became color blind as a result of an auto accident. One of the ailments that the man suffers from, as a result of the accident, is a repulsion toward many foods and eating. The book states, “He founds foods disgusting due to their grayish, dead appearance and had to close his eyes to eat.” The book goes on to say that closing his eyes and imagining the food’s proper color didn’t help enough and he began eating foods like rice and black olives that appeared more normal with his impaired color palette.

There is something called the Rainbow Diet which for all intents and purposes is a fad diet. However, it does espouse the virtue of eating foods in a variety of colors because they provide you with different vitamins and nutrients. i.e. carrots are high in vitamin A as are pumpkins, peas and broccoli. Vitamin C is found in cabbage, spinach and peppers among many others. In fact, many scientists believe that humans are attracted to foods because of their color. Apparently our ancestors were innately attracted to colorful foods as a survival strategy. Often colorful foods meant the promise of usable energy and health promoting vitamins.

So why even after reading books by Alice Waters, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Pollan who talk about the virtues of the farmer’s market and the produce section in my supermarket am I still attracted to the cakes with the artificial blue frosting? Because it’s not my fault! The answer is survival of the fittest. I was pre-programmed to like yellow bananas that offer me potassium, juicy oranges that give me vitamin c, and blue artificial frosting that assign me… hyperactive behavior!

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11 Responses to “Blue Frosting and the Survival of the Fittest”

deva Says:
March 17th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
not that you asked but i recently started making naturally flavored and colored cupcake frosting with jam. of course, blueberry jam makes a purpley frosting…which may be a disappointment to you but the point is you can have vibrant colors and really great flavor and still be au natural. not that you asked
Cecily Says:
March 17th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Not that I asked… not that I asked… you are brilliant. Thank you. I would love to experiment with this. Maybe after passover. I will let you know how it goes.
shev Says:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:36 am
Interesting analysis! But I wonder if your desire for blue frosting is more to do with our evolutionary predisposition towards sugar and fat (you gotta eat to survive the lean times), than the neon food colouring?
Emily Says:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I live in England where sadly, St Patrick’s Day does not come with green beer and bagels. But in the last few years cupcakes have started catching on. There is a beautiful little bakery called The Hummingbird, that sells beautiful cupcakes. They even have ones with red cake and white frosting. I don’t know why but I have a feeling that the red is not artificial. So I will have to check that out.
I have to agree that the allure of coloured frosting is great. Although I don’t like hard candy anymore, I’d take a blue cupcake every time.
cecily Says:
March 18th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Yes, Shev, thank you for being ever so logical when all I was trying to achieve was an irrefutable argument, built on the blocks of science, why I can’t stop myself from gorging on cake.
shev Says:
March 19th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Sorry, it’s just that food colouring is so euwy, there must be another explanation!
Although isn’t it fascinating that we evolved to eat high fat, high carb, brightly coloured food, and yet do not possess the ability to distinguish between blueberries and strawberries with thick cream, and, say, blue-frosted cupcakes?!
Hannah Lee Says:
March 19th, 2009 at 9:08 am
My family celebrates two birthdays that in some years fall on Pesach, so I’ve experimented in getting a pink color for frosting. I succeeded with using beet juice (from cooked beets), sugar, and yogurt. Anyway, this conversation motivated me to find out what were the traditional vegetable dyes for the color blue/purple and I found out about: red cabbage, woad (first-year leaves), mulberries, elderberries, grapes, blueberries, cherries (roots), blackberry, Japanese indigo, red cedar root, red maple tree (inner bark), and black iris. Now, some of these are better for coloring fabric than our food, but maybe it can spark some kitchen experiments?
cecily Says:
March 19th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Hannah, thanks for looking into that. The berries sound delicious. Throwing passover into the mix is just too much for me! I think I’ll experiment with fruit juices first. I do love the idea of mixing stewed fruit, sugar and yogurt together as a springy passover desert though.
deva Says:
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 am
cooked walnuts turn things purple.
deva Says:
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 am
not that you asked
Judith Says:
March 28th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I’ve heard that the reason we as people think flowers are pretty is because way back as hunters and gatherers, when if we noticed the flower in the wild we’d know when to come back a little later to harvest the fruit. The brighter the color of the flower, the easier it was to remember exactly where that fruit was gonna be.
On another note, my farming teacher would often tell us “red sells” – at the markets if you give folks a choice of red apples or green, they’re gonna choose red. Red raspberries, red strawberries, red peppers… all very popular food stuffs.