Dyes dying

Artificial dyes fading, but food will still get color boosts

NEW YORK >> Many companies including McDonald’s and Kellogg are purging artificial colors from their foods, but don’t expect your cheeseburgers or cereal to look much different.

Colors send important signals about food, and companies aren’t going to stop playing into those perceptions.

What’s accepted as normal can change, too, and vary by region. Up until the 1980s, Americans expected pistachios to be red because they were mostly imported from places where the nuts were dyed to cover imperfections.

“People used to get all the coloring all over their fingers. We now kind of laugh at that,” said Richard Matoian, executive director of the American Pistachio Growers, a trade association.

Now most pistachios sold in the U.S. are grown domestically and come in their naturally pale shells.

McDonald’s announced in September that it had removed artificial colors from many of its burgers and Kellogg has pledged to remove them from its cereals by the end of this year.

Americans, however, apparently aren’t entirely ready to part with the technicolor pieces that float around in milk. After removing artificial colors from Trix, General Mills poured them back in last year to bring back a “classic” version in response to customer demand.

But it’s not just processed and packaged foods that create illusions with colors. leftover milk was whiter, so cheesemakers added pigments to recreate butterfat’s golden hue, she said.

Another cheese that sometimes gets cosmetic help: mozzarella.

Sara Burnett, director of food policy at Panera Bread, said mozzarella sometimes gets its bright white from titanium dioxide, a widely used ingredient in products like mints and doughnuts.

Without it, mozzarella would be beige or off-white.

The whitening is done because most U.S.-made mozzarella starts with cow’s milk, which can have yellow hues, said Cathy Strange, global cheese buyer at Whole Foods.

In Italy, she said, mozzarella is traditionally made with water buffalo milk, which is whiter because the animal can’t digest beta carotene.

AMBER ARNOLD — WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL VIA AP This shows cheddar cheese Madison, Wis. The practice of adding color to cheddar cheese reaches back to when cheesemakers in England skimmed the butterfat from milk to make butter, according to Elizabeth Chubbuck of Murray’s Cheese in New York. The leftover milk was whiter, so pigments were added to recreate butterfat’s golden hue, she said.