Why blue is rarely for you when you sit down to dinner

WHEn Bridget Jones accidentally dyed the soup blue while preparing for a dinner party, Mark Darcy rushed to her rescue.

‘If you ask me, there isn’t enough blue food,’ he told her in the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary.

now, an Oxford University professor has investigated why we have so little appetite for blue food.

Charles Spence’s trawl of the literature on the topic includes a Japanese study in which 12 young women were given soup that had been coloured white, yellow or blue.

The volunteers were less keen on trying the blue soup, felt more anxious when asked to eat it and found it didn’t fill them up as much afterwards.

In another study, sweet popcorn tasted 40 per cent saltier when served in a blue bowl rather than a white one – perhaps because we think of salty sea water as being blue.

Research has also found that men eat less when sitting under a blue light bulb than a yellow or white one, while attempts to introduce blue ketchup and margarine have failed.

Writing in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, Professor Spence, a psychologist, said: ‘What is it about blue in food that people really dislike? Is it the rarity of the colour in natural foods that makes people wary? Or is it rather that the majority of examples of blue in food and drink to have hit the high street have been associated with artificial blue food colouring?

‘Alternatively, it might be that in our evolutionary past those foods that turned blue may have gone mouldy and so should probably have been avoided to avoid poisoning.

‘The problem with blue, at least in the mind of many consumers out there, is that it is an “unnatural” colour as far as food and drink are concerned.’

Despite this, blue food isn’t always off the menu. The colour is used in sports drinks, perhaps to make them stand out among the fruit beverages on offer, and is popular in cocktails.