It’s hard to understand but colour does funny things to us when it comes to food
‘WE EAT first with our eyes” is one of the hoariest old cliches in the book of culinary arts, and it’s hoary and ancient for a simple reason: it’s true.
For example, should your little darling be disinclined to finish his or her dinner, then play the colour trick.
Put six different colours of food on their plate and, if Dr Brian Wansink and his team at Cornell University are correct in their conclusions in a research paper published in January, you just stand back and watch them hoover it up: green broccoli; orange carrots; white potatoes or pasta; red tomatoes; yellow corn; brown sausages.
Wansink’s team discovered that children like lots of colours and lots of different items of food on their plates – six colours and seven ingredients – and they like their grub to look interesting.
Adults, however, proved to be more conservative in their ways, preferring to have three colours on the plate, and three ingredients. So don’t throw the Irish stew out just yet.
Colour does funny things to us when it comes to food, things we scarcely understand. If you are helping yourself to a dish of spaghetti pomodoro at the work canteen, you will take a smaller portion if your plate is white. If the plate is red, you will dish out more of the delicious red-sauced pasta. It is the colour-contrast between food and plate that conditions us to take less.
Some cuisines have been thinking about these visual contexts in food for a very long time. Should you have the good luck to find yourself in the acclaimed Japanese restaurant Kajitsu, on East 9th Street in New York, you will find that your meal will feature five colours – blue/green; yellow; red; white, and black/purple.
Kajitsu serves shojin ryori, vegan temple cookery which has for hundreds of years been associated with Japanese Zen Buddhism. In addition to the five colours, dinner will showcase five textures – crunchy; soft; chewy; slippery and soupy. And there will be no fewer than six tastes – bitter; sour; sweet; hot; salty and awai, which we translate as being “fleeting” or “delicate”, though perhaps “evanescent” would be better .
A variety of cooking methods will also be used including steaming, deep-frying, raw, boiled and grilled.
Colour. Texture. Taste. Technique.
But, just hang on a minute. Doesn’t the ancient shojin ryori cuisine from Japan sound remarkably like the way children like to eat? Interesting looking food with lots of colours and lots of different ingredients, nicely arranged?
But colour isn’t simply a way to aestheticise a meal, or to get children to finish their dinner. If you have 17 minutes to spare, you can view an extraordinary TED video presentation given by Dr Terry Wahls, an American physician who arrested and reversed her descent into multiple sclerosis by switching to a hunter-gatherer diet based on leaves, berries, grass-fed meats and sea vegetables.
Having seen her health deteriorate despite the best medical care, Wahls had a eureka moment when she realised that so many modern illnesses occur because our diets lack micronutrients – the vitamins, minerals and fats that keep our brains healthy.
Her solution was to be found in food: “It occurred to me that I should get my long list of nutrients from food. That if I did that I would probably get hundreds, maybe thousands, of other compounds that science had yet to name and identify, but would be helpful to my brain and my mitochondria.” (Mitochondria are the power producers in our cells.)
Wahls outlines the diet she used to cure herself, making sure she had “three cups of green leaves, three cups of sulphur-rich vegetables and three cups of bright colour” each day, in addition to organ meats, grass-fed meats and seaweeds.
So, it’s not just fish that is brain food: colourful vegetables and fruits have the elements our brains need for proper functioning. In Wahls’s case, she was soon out of her wheelchair and back on her bike. So, make sure you eat with your eyes every time you possibly can. Colour your dinner beautiful.
Dr Wahls video is at:
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John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides:
