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Colour differences can make foods taste different; for example a red and green capsicum might taste different from each other, and some might prefer one colour over another, though some can't tell the difference.

The colour of foods can affect your perception of flavour, though; a colour you find attractive in a particular kind of food might make you perceive that food as tasting better than food which has a colour less attractive to you.

So, a greyish-brown stew or casserole might not seem to taste as good as a rich-looking deep brown dish; a pasta sauce might taste better to you if it's a rich red than if it was a pale red; chocolate ice cream will be more popular if it's a good deep brown rather than a lighter colour.

This is why food manufacturers add colouring to foods, or use other processes which affect the colour, to make them appearto taste better, just as flavours might be added to make the foods actually taste different.

Gravy mixes, cakes, breads, all kinds of foods need to look good for you to feel they taste good and are worth buying. Rice is polished to look whiter, chickens are fed a diet to help the yolks of their eggs appear more golden. People tend to believe eggs with brown shells are more nutritious than pale or white shelled-eggs, and so chickens are bred and fed to achieve this as far as possible.

The agricultural industry breeds plant varieties for various positive factors, and colour is an important one. People won't be so quick to buy pale broccoli as they would bright green broccoli; a richly-coloured mango will be more popular than a lighter-coloured variety, and so on. People won't want to buy flowers that are not what they feel to be an attractive colour.

So, where a colour might not necessarily alter the actual flavour of a food, it will alter our perception of that flavour.

In prehistory we would seek out fruits and other plants whose colours took our eye; we'd eat the food, spit out the seeds, and thus keep the growing and eating cycle going. The same principle applies today, though now we hand over money for more fruit rather than spitting out the seeds and hoping a tree will eventually happen.

We won't buy a yellowish, dry-looking orange; we'll go for the one with a bright colour which looks plump and fresh. Blindfolded, the fruit might taste the same, but looking at it changes the way it tastes.

Just as we might buy hair and skin cosmetics to enhance our colouring so as to look more attractive to ourselves and others, as car manufacturers spend millions researching the colours we'll like, this year, in our cars, as we take time and trouble to select clothes by colour as well as cut, fit and fashion, colour is part of what influences our decision to buy, to eat, to drink, to wear, to own.

If a travel agent displays posters showing murky-looking seas washing onto grubby beaches, or dirty-looking snow at a ski resort, we won't especially want to go to those places.

Much more than we realise is influenced by what our eyes show us, or what we think our eyes tell us.

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13y ago

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