Can you relate to color’s delicious association to food? When you hear the color orange, what food do you visualize? When someone mentions an apple or strawberries, what color springs immediately to mind? What about when someone mentions a salad?

The fact is, food and color association go together, especially with raw foods such as carrots, oranges and strawberries. Most people don’t give much thought to the association of color and foods. For example, if presented with a blue apple and a red apple, most people would choose to eat the red one. The color blue is rarely encountered naturally, so our minds tend to not associate the color blue, and other “unnatural” colors, with less than healthy food, possibly even poisonous or dangerous foods.

When you think of a salad, you likely think green. Oranges and carrots are orange, and apples are various shades of red, yellow or green. Natural food colors are perceived by our minds as healthy and safe. In fact, in many cases, the concept of colors going along with certain foods is ingrained into the name of the food itself, oranges, blueberries or red delicious apples, for example. Foods that are the “accepted” colors are often more delicious to us.

Foods that are processed or less healthy tend to have colors that seem unnatural to us. For example, many candies are pink and processed meats are a strange mix of pink and grey. Though we have trained our minds to overcome this aversion to unnaturally colored foods, in nature this serves a great purpose, helping us to avoid spoiled or poisonous foods.

Of course, the unnatural colors of some foods are not necessarily an indicator that it is a bad food. For example, blueberries and the bright purple of prepared taro root, while perfectly healthy, may turn some people off due to their coloration.

Enjoy your healthy, colorful foods! Charli