When the television show The French Chef, featuring cooking by Julia Child, aired its first episode in color, it revealed how color can change the experience of food. While Child had charmed audiences in black and white, seeing Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise in color helped elevate the experience from merely entertaining to mouthwatering. Over a period of 20 years, researchers studied how people vary in their ability to recognize images of prepared food. What they discovered is that colorblind people are less likely to be picky eaters. People with normal color vision use color cues to judge the freshness, ripeness, or safety of food. A restricted color palette limits these automatic visual warning flags. Without strong color signals telling the brain to feel cautious or disgusted by unfamiliar hues, the emotional impulse to reject new foods goes down and people rely more heavily on taste, smell and texture when choosing what to eat.
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| Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise, in gray scale, color, and simulating the most common form of color blindness |
