As pressure grows to get artificial colors out of the U.S. food supply, the shift may well start at Abby Tampow’s laboratory desk.
Tampow is part of the team at Sensient Technologies Corp., one of the world’s largest dyemakers, that is rushing to help the salad dressing manufacturer — along with thousands of other American businesses — meet demands to overhaul colors used to brighten products from cereals to sports drinks.
“Most of our customers have decided that this is finally the time when they’re going to make that switch to a natural color,” said Dave Gebhardt, Sensient’s senior technical director. He joined a recent tour of the Sensient Colors factory in a north St. Louis neighborhood.
Last week, U.S. health officials announced plans to persuade food companies to voluntarily eliminate petroleum-based artificial dyes by the end of 2026.
I can’t have been the only person who first read that as “beetlejuice.”
If food is less pretty, maybe our fat asses will eat less of it.
Why are Republicans so enthralled with eating bugs? I’ll take the beet juice, but I’d rather eat some oil than bugs.
I’m good with the bug juice instead of petroleum. Eating that has never killed anyone (that I know of) vs drinking some tar sands’ slop.
Adding bugs into food products purposefully creates issues with large numbers of people who follow religious diets. Jains, Buddhists, Muslim and Jews all have religious restrictions on which bugs, if any, are fit for consumption.
While I agree moving away from fossil fuels is important, I think it’s important to make accommodations for people’s cultures and try to take actions that wouldn’t alienate them. One doesn’t have to share another’s cultural beliefs to understand they should be considered and respected. This isn’t to say we should continue using petroleum based dyes, but that the search for alternatives shouldn’t end at insects just because it could be a cheaper option for the business owners, which, I’m sure we know, is the real reason that any large industry will shift to an alternative dye.
Go ahead and produce a dye for them, nobody is stopping you.
How about neither, lol. They’ll come up with some healthy synthetic dye fast enough if enough money is on the line.
Or how about we just stop dying the foods? Yes it will be weird at first but we’ll get used to it eventually.
That way we can skip the bad chemicals and the gross alternatives.
how would fanta be recognizable, what about easter eggs, or doritos? so many great American foods depend on extremely bright vibrant colors so as to avoid confusion as to whether orange flavor is referring to the color or the tree thing.
Packaging. And we “great Americans” can learn to tell the difference.
“How will I know whether this chip tastes like citrus?” shouldn’t really be an issue.
We could probably still do Easter eggs, just don’t eat ‘em, and if stupid people still eat them BUT we’ve eliminated the rest of the dyes, then the harm is minimized.
The dyes we already have are safe and banning them is unnecessary in the first place.
When coloring stuff with Carmine (used for ~3000 years by now) becomes a revolutionary idea in the US…
PS: Also civilised regions are actually thinking about replacements as that color is often used in food that would be vegan without it.
