Our bizarre brains

A little light reading while we sit and wonder whether our government is going to shut down...

An article earlier this week in the New York Times wondered why we (more specifically, food manufacturers) cram all sorts of artificial coloring into our foods, when they do nothing to impact the flavor and may in fact cause increased hyperactivity in children (yikes).

Without the artificial coloring FD&C Yellow No. 6, Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks would look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect. Not surprisingly, in taste tests, people derived little pleasure from eating them.

Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring.

“People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren’t much fun to eat,” said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university’s Food and Brand Lab.

Naked Cheetos would not seem to have much commercial future. Nor might some brands of pickles. The pickling process turns them an unappetizing gray. Dye is responsible for their robust green. Gummi worms without artificial coloring would look, like, well, muddily translucent worms. Jell-O would emerge out of the refrigerator a watery tan...

“Color is such a crucial part of the eating experience that banning dyes would take much of the pleasure out of life,” said Kantha Shelke, a food chemist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists...

Indeed, color often defines flavor in taste tests. When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding, consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like vanilla pudding. Color creates a psychological expectation for a certain flavor that is often impossible to dislodge, Dr. Shelke said.

“Color can actually override the other parts of the eating experience,” she said in an interview.

First of all, I had no idea pickles were often dyed green. That's actually kind of gross. But more importantly, this is just one of those crazy times where I have no response but to shake my head and say "people are weird". Our brains are funny, complex organs that often behave in ways that surprise, confuse, or frustrate us. Even that seems a little weird when you think about it--the brain is so bizarre that it regularly confuses itself.

But this article's finding also speaks to the power of prejudice, which I think is something that we need to be careful of in all aspects of life. We perceive something that is vanilla-flavored to be lemon, simply because we changed the color--that's harmlessly weird in this context, but it could in fact be dangerous under different circumstances. I don't want to push this analogy too far in the direction of its clear racial implications, but it's hard not to draw that comparison.

Throughout our lives, we condition our brains to operate more efficiently, which often means relying on shortcuts and heuristics that serve us well most of the time. Assuming that something is vanilla (or bland) simply because it is white saves us the effort of actually tasting and analyzing it. It's easy to put our brains on autopilot and let these shortcuts guide the way, but sometimes doing so can get us in trouble. If there are exceptions to what our brain perceives as rules, it's easy to get caught off-guard. Our brains are simply trying to do the best they can to construct order amid a world of chaos, but sometimes they fail; we need to be aware of our brains' fallibility, so that we don't become victim to it.

Then again, maybe I'm reading too much into this. Maybe Cheetos just suck.

[New York Times]

P.S.- Upon further reflection, I still refuse to believe that Crystal Pepsi would've tasted good to me if it had just had a little caramel color...that stuff tasted like poison.