21
votes
On attempts to replace artificial food dyes by Mars Inc. (2016)
Link information
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- Title
- The Quest to Make a True Blue M&M (Published 2016)
- Authors
- Malia Wollan
- Published
- Oct 5 2016
- Word count
- 4779 words
I hesitate to contribute negatively to this conversation, since the subject matter (screening natural products for use under specific chemical conditions) is genuinely interesting! But the particular quality of feeling I get from knowing this gargantuan effort has been expended so that petty, ignorant consumers won’t pitch a fit is … frustrating.
It reminds me of an article about zipper manufacturing, and in particular, an aside at the end which has stuck with me:
The opening quote of the NY times article already had me seething. I understand that the point is to find replacements for — specifically — the unnaturally bright coloured M&M’s. But this entire premise hurts me:
“Ugly little pebbles”. There are brown M&M’s. And the inside of a skittle is white. It’s absurd that this isn’t enough.
I understand that the stated explanation for adding colour variety is some nonsense to do with food quality perception (the article suggests the existence of studies demonstrating this, and cites nothing. I refuse to do more work than a paid journalist). But this effort could have been spent so much more effectively.
Study improving the palatability of food for chemo patients. Research how to cheaply and healthfully process foodstuffs so they retain nutrition and flavour while shipped to those in need. Survey populations to find lower carbon meals that could be promoted in different food cultures. Anything, anything but this.
The most 'effective' thing for us to do would be for everyone to eat nothing but uncolored, unflavored nutrient paste.
This isn't government money. It's not tax dollars. It's corporate funds developing new techniques in order to sell their products better without artificial dyes. I understand your frustration, but I think you're being unreasonably negative.
My understanding is that the most efficient allocation of resources is to have minimally processed foods consumed by people close to the food’s site of production. So that probably means a lot of fresh and colourful vegetables during the harvest seasons, and more preserved food + animal products (milk, cheese, salted meat, etc.) during the off season. Not sure where you came to your conclusion from.
I didn’t argue at any point that it wasn’t. If you want the subtext as text, I’m railing against consumerism.
Also, if we’re OK with commenting on each other’s tone: although I understand that we have a difference of opinion, I think you’re being unquestioning and unreasonably dismissive. But it’d be cool if we kept to discussing the substance of our each other’s comments instead of making meta-commentary.
Not everyone lives in places like California where they can be blessed with fertile soil and a temperate climate. Where do you suppose a person living in Phoenix, Arizona or an Albertan oil field is going to be getting these fresh and colorful vegetables?
If we want to talk about pure brutal efficiency @R3qn65 is right. Centralized production in places well suited to growing a variety of crops or optimally raising animals and then processing them for shelf-stability, yield, and nutritional balance would be the way to do it. Food being local and fresh is more about taste and enjoyment than efficiency/productivity.
True, as long as the risks of supply chains are managed. People with farms and gardens did better during the Great Depression and I believe during many wars.
Fair enough! Although would you say that the result of such a process would be “uncolored, unflavored nutrient paste” (per the original post)? It sounds like you’re describing canned, dried, salted, or preserved food.
I believe that poster was making a strawman argument, which I disagreed with, but your take seems good.
I think if you let the efficiency optimization flywheel run long enough we’d probably start to approach the “nutrient paste” eventually, but people have a lot of emotional feelings around food and eating so we won’t let it come to that on any sort of recognizable timeline. But we do see the effects of monoculture happening now, with a lot of varieties of crops slowly and steadily being replaced be GMO ones that are some combination of pest and drought tolerant or just easier to harvest through mechanized means. But that is also basically why there are artificial colors and dyes and things, most of these processed things just come out inconsistent since they’re natural and then they put a little color and flavor to make sure each batch tastes consistent so you don’t have jar of strawberry jam taste and look different from another.
Overall though I don’t think it’s the dyes and stabilizers that are the problem, it’s that those are usually deployed to make unhealthy things look more appetizing. So if you’re consuming a lot of them then you’re probably drinking a lot of Mountain Dew and such. But I think its useful that one Gatorade flavor should be orange and another one should be blue so that I can visually differentiate that these are different flavors of drink and have some mental signal as to what those flavors are even if it turns out the “grape flavor” tastes more like “purple” than like any grape I’ve ever eaten. There’s still something being communicated about the product by doing it.
We don't need to process everything to hell to keep people fed: we have the means of transporting fresh fruits and vegetables very long distances. I live in California and there are apple groves within a short driving distance from me, yet the vast majority of Apples in the markets come from Washington state. Likewise, there are some fruits that are in markets across the entire country that don't grow here, like Bananas. Las Vegas is known for high quality food options even though it's surrounded by desert for miles in every direction. Phoenix, likewise, is not lacking for fresh food.
Totally true, but very US-centric. Nobody's shipping fresh fruits and vegetables to the people who live in the Sahara, for instance.
It’s US centric because I was giving examples that were easily observable.
Why do you think that there isn’t anyone shipping fresh foods to the Sahara? I can practically guarantee you that that happens without needing to do any real research on it.
You may not have the same stuff coming in, but that doesn’t mean that nothing goes there. Beyond that there are still native edible plants that grow there.. People have lived there for millennia and I don’t think they have done so entirely on imported tinned goods.
I spent several years living in the Sahel, which is on the border of the Sahara. No, people are not shipping fresh foods there. :) I think it's really hard to appreciate just how austere the Sahara and Sahel are if you haven't lived it in person. The inhabitants live mostly on pasta, powdered milk, and goat and camel. Of course people don't live solely on imported tinned goods, but was that ever really the point up for debate?
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words; the best I can offer to show you what the Sahara is like is this documentary from al-Jazeera. It's part three of three. If you're interested, the whole thing is good.
https://www.aljazeera.com/videos/2014/1/23/orphans-of-the-sahara-exile
I do not have the time to watch this video at the moment, but I'm more than happy to be proven wrong.
Yeah that stuff is all there but it’s not efficient, it’s actually quite wasteful in terms of water consumption and even the “natural” produce is genetically modified and chemically treated to all hell to make it ship well without getting so banged up nobody will want to buy it.
I mean, if we're talking truly BRUTAL efficiency, someone shouldn't live in Phoenix without being and to thrive on indigenous food. We currently can do all of the things you described to optimize for distribution, but only as long as it's sustainable.
Phoenix maybe, but sometimes large clusters of people have to live in crappy places because there’s an economic reason for it. Like oil fields and mines tend not to be in fertile areas, and even if they are they aren’t going to be arable for long once your extractive operations get going.
Is there not joy in color? In the world of art, much blood, sweat, and treasure have been expended in finding beautiful, vibrant pigments and making them industrially available to everyone. Thanks to those efforts, we now live in a world of chromatic vibrancy.
We've come a long way when a rich purple harvested from sea snails was so precious that only the highest nobility could afford to wear it. Now anyone can walk into a store and buy a rich purple shirt for an hour's wage.
But people want colorful food. It makes them happy, simply.
I can't help but feeling that colored food is an attempt to fool people. Humans have evolved to prefer colorful food because colors represent the nutrients inside of them. A big red tomato looks appetizing because it's full of those nutrients, but a red M&M doesn't have any of those. Sometimes food manufacturers will use these kinds of things to trick you into experiencing things that aren't actually there. IIRC (it's been forever since I ate it and won't be doing it again), Trix cereal is shaped and colored like six different fruits, but all of them are the same "fruit" flavor.
Besides that, I honestly think it's kind of a shame that food manufacturers invest so much time and money into finding colorants that are consistent rather than just allowing natural variations in color hue and intensity. Variation makes things look more interesting. An apple that has bursts of red and green and brown looks more appetizing to me than one that is all red.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered. I think that through a perspective of material honesty and naturalism, food dyes are dishonest and not desirable.
On the other hand, so much of human existence is tied with denying and defying nature — and deceiving ourselves, it's hard to draw the line.
I think that's more cultural than objective.
All the cosmetically perfect — perfect to the point of being sterile and boring — fruits and produce we have today came about because a past generation grew up with ugly produce and wanted perfect produce.
Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye looks bland to us. Many people today think that the International Style of architecture looks uninteresting: straight lines, clean planes, little color. But the style was revolutionary in a time: straight, clean, perfect forms were so interesting when everything else in the built environment was handmade, crooked, and messy. Ironically, people now are bored of clean, boxy designs and now cherish handmade, crooked buildings.
Yves Klein famously created a painting that's just a plain blue rectangle. Once upon a time, it would've stopped people dead in their tracks. Now no one's going to stop for a blue rectangle.
I think that's just the nature of novelty. Everything interesting today will someday become uninteresting, and vice versa, and the cycle will begin anew.
I like your comment a lot, especially the reference to how taste is cyclical.
However, I’d like to mention that a lot of the agricultural genomic engineering we have performed is not just cosmetic. A LOT of modification is to improve shelf life, increase durability during transport, pest and environmental resilience, anti-competitive practices (sterility), etc.
I will say, at the end of the day the marketability does matter as well, and right now we are emphasizing sight over taste, ofc, because in the USA it is rare to be able to taste a fruit before you buy it. They barely let you see the inside. Sometimes I wish we would emphasize smell ! I know it’s a trope at this point but if you smell most big box produce in the USA, it smells like nothing and hence, tastes like nothing.
It could be deception or it could be art, but ultimately ultra-processed foods are made by people who hate you and would feed you heroin if it upped their profit margin by 1 cent. So we must assume the former in commercial contexts.
"Ultra-processed" is a meaningless term in this context because it applies equally to homemade bread and tofu as to products like M&Ms.
Is corporate designed food a better term?
Many snack foods and desserts are designed to be exceptionally palatable and addictive and to extend the period between eating and feeling satiated.
I definitely think it's closer to what people actually mean when they refer to "ultra-processed foods," at least.
It's really not - I specifically used the term "ultra-processed food" to include things like homemade bread just as equally as M&Ms. You could use the term "complicatedly cooked food" instead, if you like.
The point is, whenever a corporation alters/processes the food in any way, they're potentially poisoning it/making it addictive and you can't trust them not to. I emphasize, the problem isn't the altering or processing of food (again, homemade fork-mashed potato is "processed food"), the problem is psychopathic corporations and their intent.
Theoretically, an angelic corporation would be just as good as home-cooking or better.
Theoretically, homemade ultra-processed food is great, but practically speaking, nobody home-makes their ultra-processed food.
I wouldn’t argue against colourful food making people happy; that makes sense! The thrust of my argument is that spending a tonne of effort (eg. employing months to years of time from a team of PhD chemists) on making M&M’s sell better, when viewed from the perspective of a person living in a pre-scarcity civilization where alternative in-scope problems exist for those skill sets, can be seen as a proportionately less useful endeavour compared to many others.
Another question arises from that statement: can you compare the (hypothetical) enjoyment a chemotherapy recipient could have while eating some taste optimized food to, as is the topic of this thread, the enjoyment of many more people eating blue M&Ms? I would argue yes, and I would happily click the button which snapped all the blue chocolates out of existence so that cancer patients could have a small part of their burden lifted. But I appreciate that that’s an inherently non-universal cost function which everyone defines differently. Furthermore, my framing of child dying of cancer vs. rando at a vending machine was chosen specifically to further my point by examining it in the extremes. Mostly I’m trying to underline the absurdity of the situation.
This will make you company wealthier. Helping people in need won't, unless the cost is subsidized. (I agree with you)
Mirror: https://archive.is/Ih5pd
Really interesting and topical given current events. Thanks for digging this up.
I'm glad companies are doing this, but sad that each one will have to do the same research over and over to come up with the same outcomes. Small businesses likely will be limited to known quantities like beet juice.
If they do manage to come up with those perfect shades, they are hardly going to share that recipe with anyone else, it's proprietary!