Today is the day when all across our land, people gather to celebrate food coloring. In kitchens, in restaurants, in bars, they partake of special holiday foods, each given “a touch of the green”–green beer, green milkshakes, green pasta. It’s a touching and important reminder of the importance of color additives to our diet.
What’s that? It’s St. Patrick’s Day, not the annual Food Coloring Festival? Oh.
Well, whatever day it is, it’s still a good one to talk about food coloring, since so much of it will be used, albeit it mostly the same color. Actually, any day would be a good day to talk about food coloring, but a lot more foods than you might think are colored.
We color foods to make them more appealing. Colorless or unattractively colored food just doesn’t look as appetizing. The idea of prettying up a recipe with color isn’t a new one, either; historians figure food coloring emerged as far back as 1500 B.C., if not earlier.
For most of the centuries since, the colorings used came from natural sources. Turmeric, paprika and saffron, for example, each give a distinctive color to food. But in the 19th century, as science and technology exploded, many new types of food coloring appeared, whipped up in chemist’s labs and, in many cases, not intended for use in food at all.
In the late 1800s, for example, some manufacturers colored foods with compounds that contained toxic chemicals–even arsenic. Not only that, the coloring was used to mask poor quality or even spoiled foods. By the turn of the century, more than 80 artificial coloring agents were on the market, some of them intended for dying textiles, not food. Most of these man-made colors were made from aniline, which is toxic in its pure form. It’s better known as “coal tar,” because the materials for making it are derived from coal.
The traditional coloring agents from plant, animal and mineral sources were still available, but these man-made colors were easier and less expensive to make. Artificial colors color better, so smaller quantities are required, and they don’t change the flavors of the foods the color (unlike, say, paprika!). But the safety hazards couldn’t be ignored, and governments stepped in and began regulating color additives. Today, instead of more than 80, there are only a handful of artificial coloring agents that are approved for use in food. As well, manufacturers may not use colors to disguise inferior or spoiled products.
Articificial coloring agents typically have names like “Blue No. 1” or “Yellow No. 6,” names which come from the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations color certification system. Natural coloring agents, on the other hand, have much more colorful (you’ll pardon the pun) names, such as the aforementioned saffron, turmeric and paprika, plus others like carrot juice, grape skin extract and beet powder. Others include annatto, caramel color, cochineal extract (a.k.a. carmine) and titanium dioxide.
The sources for these colors are as varied as the colors themselves. Annatto, for example, is a red-yellow dye derived from the seeds of tropical trees. Caramel color is created by heating sugar and other carbohydrates under carefully controlled conditions. Cochineal extract–carmine–is a red dye prepared from the dried bodies of the females of an insect called Dactylopius coccus, which lives on cactus plants in Central and South America. Titanium dioxide is a naturally occurring white pigment found in a variety of crystal forms.
Besides being divided into natural and artificial, food colorings are further divided into “dyes” and “lakes.”
A dye is a water-soluble form of a food coloring. They’re usually manufactured as powders, granules or liquids, so they can easily be mixed into a variety of foods, from beverages (without food coloring, colas would be clear) to candies (who’d want to eat a candy cane without any stripes?) to pet foods (the pet couldn’t care less, but the rule of thumb in the pet food industry is, you’ve got to make it look appetizing to the owners).
A lake is a non-water-soluble form of a color. Lakes are more stable, and are used for coloring products that contain fats and oils or insufficient moisture to dissolve dyes. The colored coatings on drug tablets, for instance, are created using lakes.
Governments are extremely cautious about what they allow to be added to foods, and you can be sure any coloring used in a North American-produced food product has been tested extensively. However, no food additive can ever be proven to be 100 percent safe–nothing can ever be proven to be 100 percent safe–and different people react to different things. A couple of the approved food colorings have come under suspicion in recent years. A color called FD&C Yellow No. 5, for example, can cause hives in a small segment of the population (less than one in 10,000 people). Another, called FD&C Red No. 3, has been associated with thyroid tumours in male rats, but the risk to humans is vanishingly small. (Another red dye, called Red No. 2, was banned in the U.S.–but not in Canada–in the 1970s because of highly inconclusive studies that it might cause cancer in female rats.)
When findings like these arise, people tend to think that someone must have messed up to allow the chemical to be used in the first place, but that’s really not a fair judgement. The fact is, our scientific ability has grown to the point that we can assess risks that were undetectable 10 years ago. In fact, we can measure such tiny amounts of risk that governments now must struggle with the question of what level of risk is permissible. In many cases, the risk posed by eating the foods being colored is much higher than any risk that could possibly be posed by the tiny amounts of food coloring present!
Food coloring is all around us. It’s used to make our margarine yellow (otherwise it would be a not-very-pleasant shade of white–just ask Quebeckers, who are only now getting colored margarine) and our butter yellower. It’s used to make our oranges oranger–otherwise, more of them would have mottled green peels. It makes our colas brown, our strawberry ice cream pink, our lime sherbert green, our Smarties multi-colored–and, today only, our beer green.
Without it, St. Patrick’s Day–and every other day–would be a much drabber and (barring the green beer) less appetizing place.
