E for Additives. Maurice Hanssen
yellow skins are thought to look and taste better than the white birds preferred in Britain, and the colours can be achieved directly from the xanthophylls in the feed. It is possible to cheapen the diet by using a mixture of cereals and supplementing with pigments, or to add pigments to a maize feed to ensure a deep colour.
It is also possible to produce similarly coloured chickens when the feeds are not fresh, and for this purpose lutein (El6lb), which can be extracted from marigolds, is added to the feed.
Trout and Salmon
There is a long history of trout farming in Britain, certainly going back to the medieval monasteries where farmed trout brightened the Friday fast. Today the farming of salmon, trout and other fish is big business, but have you ever wondered about the great increase in the availability of delicious pink-fleshed trout and salmon? The pink flesh would, in natural waters, be from fresh foods such as crustaceans, shrimp, prawn, lobster (astaxanthin) and various algae.
It is too expensive to feed the farm fish the crustaceans of their usual environment, so a red pigment, canthaxanthin (El6lg), or astaxanthin (no E number), is added to the feed to produce pink flesh. El6lg and certain other pigments, including various forms of carotene and vitamin A, are also sold in tablet form so that we can look as if we have been on a Mediterranean holiday and developed a nice, if often rather yellowish, tan. Be warned though that such coloration gives no protection from sunburn and is there, as in the case of the fish, strictly for appearance’s sake. See additional note on page 374.
Other Uses of Pigments
Pigments are commonly found in pet feeds especially for captive birds so that their colourful plumage is maintained. Zoo flamingos are fed with canthaxanthin to ensure the pinkness of their legs, beaks and feathers. Such commonplace pet foods as dog biscuits and meats often appear to contain significant quantities of undeclared colours. It is doubtful whether these are truly appreciated by the animal, but they do attract the owner.
There are widespread abuses of the external colouring of seafood. For example, jumbo prawns and smoked cod’s roe are frequently on sale in the fish shop without any ingredient declaration, but they have quite often unquestionably been dipped in a heavy concentration of red dye.
Smoked fish is another loophole. Fish can be called ‘smoked’ when all that has happened is that they have been dipped in a liquid smoke flavour and then artificially coloured! Indeed, smoked and cured fish which is not packed ready for the consumer, like ham, just has to say ‘added permitted colour’, but if it is pre-packed the full declaration is required.
Consumer choice means the freedom to make an informed choice and although we think that the use of these artificial and natural additives in animal feeds presents no toxic hazard to the consumer, we do believe that we have a right, as is the case with eggs in the United States, to know what pigments have been added. In addition, acceptable and legally controlled levels of daily intake should be established and enforced. If the egg regulations are so changed, it would be a good opportunity to label egg boxes with the date the eggs were laid and not the less useful date of packing.
Food has been coloured since ancient times. The Romans coloured bread and wine both with ‘white earth’ and berries. When Britain first imported that rare luxury, sugar, in the twelfth century, the pink- and violet-coloured sugars of Alexandria were, according to John Wallford,1 great favourites. Tyrian purple (from sea snails), madder (from the roots of a herb) and kermes (from a scale insect) are thought to have provided the varying shades of this part of the spectrum.
The red colour of cochineal (E120), was used at least as early as the tenth century by the Toltecs and then the Aztecs of Central America and, as with Egypt and the Mediterranean countries, where the same dyes were used for cloth and for food, it is most likely that cochineal was a food colour.
Many years ago at social meetings of food chemists and before we were in the least worried about the possibility that sweets could rot the teeth (or to be more precise feed the bacteria that do that dark deed), the manufacturers of Newberry Fruits, a range of sweets that were coloured, flavoured and shaped to represent miniature versions of the fruits of which they tasted, gave us a selection of this product in a specially prepared form where all the flavours were jumbled up. Only the most experienced palates could correctly identify a sweet that looked like a strawberry but tasted like a pineapple. So it is clear that colour has a very important role to play in our appreciation and enjoyment of food, affecting not only our eyes but also our taste and even, it is thought, our digestion.
By the same token, colour can influence us into thinking that inferior food that looks attractive also tastes good and is, no doubt, good for us.
Probably the most widely quoted and, in our view, illogical test of the response of the consumer to colour was undertaken by Dr Nathan Goldenberg of Marks & Spencer following certain complaints that their tinned peas were an artificial shade of green and the strawberry jam was an unnatural red. The colours were removed and the peas became grey/green and the strawberries red/brown. The customers stopped buying and it took a long time with the colours restored to bring back lost sales. The reason why this test was so pointless and inconclusive is that there was no clear explanation to the customers as to why the changes had happened and what they might expect when they took the product home. Today we have a completely different situation where very many manufacturers have taken the green colour out of peas and the red out of strawberry jam and have suffered no loss of sales. This seems to show that, with information and education, we can change our perception as to what looks good and tasty.
Added colour is like a cosmetic Like all cosmetics colours can improve the appearance delight the onlooker and deceive the senses. Added colours are not necessary, they are a matter of choice The author had a letter published in The Times on 23 January 1970 which pleaded that, as The World Health Organization had recommended, baby foods should be free from artificial colours, also that we all should be able to tell what is in the food we eat by reading the label. Neither request has yet been granted, but there is hope for babies, for the Food Advisory Committee (FAC) is recommending in its 1987 Report1 that baby foods should be without artificial colours. We do not know how long it will take to turn this recommendation into law but wish it every success. Only in 1986 did it become necessary to label at least most of the ingredients in the foods that we eat. So the battle to have the freedom to choose what we want to, or do not want to, eat is certainly not quick or easy.
The Functions of Colours
Colours have well defined food functions:
(a) to reinforce colours introduced into foods by their ingredients but where, without added colouring matter, the colour imparted to the final food by those ingredients would be weaker than the colour the consumer will associate with the food of that type of flavour (e.g. soft drinks, fruit yogurts, pickles and sauces);
(b) to ensure uniformity of colour from batch to batch where ingredients of varying colour intensity have been used (e.g. jams in transparent containers where the customer can compare like with like in the shop);
(c) to restore something of the food’s original appearance in those cases where the natural colours have been destroyed by heat processing and subsequent storage (e.g. peas, beans, strawberries and raspberries), or bleached out by the use of preservatives (e.g. fruit preservatives, sulphur dioxide for jammaking out of season), or are not light-stable during prolonged storage (e.g. soft drinks);
(d) to give colour to foods which otherwise would be virtually colourless (e.g. boiled sweets, instant desserts, ice lollies).
‘Need’ is an essential reason for deciding that a food