Authors: Joanna Blythman
Many raw foods such as fruit and vegetables have a bright attractive colour. However, the colour of some foods is reduced during food processing. Other foods such as confectionery items and flavoured soft drinks would be grey or colourless if colour was not added to them during the manufacturing process.
This cool executive summary is a strategic understatement. The industrial manufacturing process strips food of its pigments, spewing out lifeless, ashen, washed-out tones. If we saw it looking like this, we wouldn’t want to eat it. Our brains wouldn’t signal to us that we were seeing food. Perhaps we aren’t.
Added colour is all-important in manufactured food, not only because it improves its dismal appearance, but also because it tricks us on flavour. The FSA explains how this sleight of hand works:
The colour of food is important for consumers as it is the first characteristic to be noticed and one of the main ways of visually assessing a food before it is consumed. The perceived colour provides an indication of the expected taste of a food. If the flavour of a food product is inconsistent with the colour, the flavour can often be perceived incorrectly; for example an orange-flavoured drink coloured green could be perceived to taste of lime.
In other words, added colour cons us into thinking that processed food tastes of something that it doesn’t, and primes us visually for the kind of flavour to expect, a party trick that helps cover up its yawning taste deficit. There is also a plausible theory that added colour provides a contextual cue to eat more. Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing and nutritional science, says: ‘People eat with their eyes, and their eyes trick their stomachs. If we think there’s more variety in a candy dish or on a buffet table, we will eat more. The more colors we see, the more we eat.’
While most of us can figure out that radiant sweets and lurid fizzy drinks must owe their gaudy hue to some sort of colorant, the general creep of added colour into thousands of everyday products largely passes us by. Yet imposter colours are in our sandwich fillers, soups, salads and sauces, in breads, biscuits and brioche, in fish, cheeses, meats and margarines. A dash of red makes pasta sauce look as if it contains more tomato than it really does. Just a hint of yellow mixed with orange makes anaemic waffles look deliciously bronzed. A smidgen of brown gives watery, starchy gravy in a ready-meal sausage hotpot a wholly misleading slow-cooked, concentrated appearance. The addition of green disguises the greyness of tinned peas.
It is no exaggeration to say that certain types of processed food would be unsellable without added colouring. A case in point is surimi, the heavily processed, minced fish protein that is used to imitate fresh prawns or crabmeat. This substance makes a frequent appearance in seafood hotpots served by Asian restaurants. It also turns up regularly buried in the centre of your sushi rolls, the sort you might pick up in supermarkets and takeaways, without closely examining the label. A range of red colourings give the grey fish protein mulch a pretty shrimp-pink hue. White colourings, such as calcium carbonate and titanium dioxide, endow it with the pearly whiteness of fresh crab claw meat.
From the late 1980s, concerns about colourings became the standard-bearer for a mounting critique of industrialised food. Following the publication in 1989 of Maurice Hanssen’s influential book,
E for Additives
, public suspicion about food crystallised around them. Food campaigners picked up on research that suggested some of the most commonly used food colours could have adverse health effects, notably in children, the prime consumers of highly coloured products. Anecdotes circulated of toddlers who all but climbed the walls after sucking on orange lollies, or threw the most awful tantrums after eating strawberry jelly at a birthday party.
Food manufacturers hate their products being put in the spotlight; it’s tricky when people start scrutinising ingredients and asking difficult questions. But rather than put a head above the parapet, they rely on our food regulators to fight their corner for them. By 2000, when the FSA was set up in response to calls for an independent food watchdog, it showed no particular appetite for tackling health issues around food colourings, but a turning point came in 2004 when a team of researchers from Southampton University concluded that six colours, used extensively in popular children’s food, in combination with the preservative sodium benzoate, were causing hyperactivity and allergies in toddlers.
The colourings in question – sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), allura red (E129), carmoisine (E122), tartrazine (E102) and ponceau 4R (E124) – have subsequently gained notoriety as the ‘Southampton Six’. These thoroughly artificial, chemically synthesised colours can contain toxins such as mercury and lead. Like many other food colourings, they also have many other industrial uses apart from food processing: textile colorants, paints, printing inks, varnishes, plastics, and crayons.
Presented with the Southampton findings, the FSA stepped in with reassuring words, as is its custom: ‘All additives must pass strict safety checks before they can be used in foods and if any new evidence were to emerge from this or other work their safety would be reviewed.’ However, the agency did fund the Southampton team to carry out further research. Three years later, the team came back with a second, more extensive study, published in
The Lancet
, one that is difficult to ignore. It studied 900 three- to nine-year-olds, and demonstrated a persuasive link between the consumption of these artificial colours and increased hyperactivity (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
Faced with a scientific study that it had to admit was of the highest quality, the FSA advised parents of children showing signs of hyperactivity to avoid giving them food and drink that contained the ‘Southampton Six’ colours, and encouraged food manufacturers to stop using the colours voluntarily. By 2010, under pressure from food campaigners, the UK had to go along with an EU-wide compulsory warning, instigated by the European Food Standards Agency, that any food and drink containing any of the six offenders must carry the health warning: ‘May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.’ A killer phrase, fit to stop even the most laid-back parents in their tracks. As one flavour company executive put it: ‘Consumers are increasingly aware of the potential health risks associated with the consumption of artificial colours. These risks received substantiation with the decision by the European Food Standards Agency to force labelling on the “Southampton Six”.’
In the UK, post the ‘Southampton Six’, food manufacturers began reformulating products, replacing artificial chemical colours with those that could legally be described comfortingly as ‘natural’. Soft drinks were first in line. Asda, for instance, replaced the carmoisine in its cherryade, while Tizer removed ponceau 4R and sunset yellow, indicative of a widespread industry shift. Supermarkets demanded that their manufacturers remove any of the ‘Southampton Six’ colours from products such as ready-meal curries and curry sauces. Tandoori paste, for instance, owed its bright red colour to the inclusion of either allura red, carmoisine or ponceau 4R, sometimes combined with sunset yellow.
Food and drink manufacturers grumbled about the technical problems of swapping to ‘natural’ colourings. These are more inclined to bleed into one another, or look hazy. They aren’t as intense as artificial ones, so manufacturers need to use more of them, and they are more prone to fading, so have a shorter shelf life. They are also more likely to form an oily ring in necks of bottles of coloured drinks. But it was an unstoppable tide; by 2011, global sales of ‘natural’ colourings outstripped those of artificial ones. Now, products containing the ‘Southampton Six’ have effectively been relegated to the food industry sin bin, and become an emblem for precisely the sort of product that anyone remotely informed will want to avoid: the worst sorts of fizzy drinks, the ghastliest gummy sweets. Under pressure from their customers, supermarkets can’t get lines with artificial colourings off their shelves fast enough. M&S, for example, boasts that 99% of its food is free from artificial colours.
But all this activity leaves one very obvious question unanswered: if the ‘Southampton Six’ caused adverse reactions, what about all the other E number colours? Might they be as bad?
Now that’s a very pertinent question, because these dyes aren’t the only colours with persistent safety issues hanging over them. Artificial caramels, the sort used in cola, or to make muffins look more chocolatey, or to give meat an inviting roasted appearance, are a case in point. These are formulated by heating sugars, such as fructose, invert sugar or sucrose, and chemically modifying them, using acids, alkalis, or salts, so triggering a chemical reaction that produces the desired brown effect.
This class of brown colourings known as E150 in Europe, has been given ‘generally regarded as safe’ status by food regulators, provided we don’t consume more than the specified ‘acceptable daily intake’, but this limit was calculated back in 1985, when we consumed much less food and drink containing caramel than we do now. Furthermore, it was based on safety-testing data presented by the caramel-colouring industry itself, in the shape of a body known as the European Technical Caramel Association (EUTECA), which describes its purpose as follows:
EUTECA’s mission is to improve general knowledge about caramel colour and its benefits, and to deliver factual information about caramel colour to European authorities, other bodies such as the Codex Alimentarius [an intergovernmental body that sets global food standards], and the general public, e.g. consumers or journalists.
Bluntly, EUTECA is a lobbyist for global food-additive companies with a vested interest in seeing their products commercialised, an organisation that knocks on the doors of regulators and arms them with a prêt-a-porter dossier to show that its members’ products are safe. But prominent independent food groups don’t accept that they are indeed safe, and are concerned that the ammonia sulfite process, used to make colouring for some colas, may form carcinogens. In the USA, cola brands have reformulated their drinks to remove the most controversial of these caramel colourings. In the UK, however, cola recipes remain unchanged as the European Food Safety Authority found that the original formulation does not pose a health risk to humans.
Like caramel, titanium dioxide E171 is another colouring in common use that is dogged by persistent health fears. Extracted from mineral ores, it makes hard shell chewing gums snowy white, and provides a base coat for coated sweets that allows the top colour to stand out. The base coat analogy is apt: titanium dioxide is also used to make paint. Described by one colour company representative as ‘very cheap and very white’, titanium dioxide is, according to the European Food Safety Authority, which is meant to be up-to-speed on these things, perfectly safe. It says: ‘We are not aware of any scientific data supporting possible carcinogenic effects of oral exposure to titanium dioxide.’ This colouring has, however, been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’, and one study has suggested a link to Crohn’s disease. In 2013 a spokesman for Beneo, a prominent food ingredients company, was heavily promoting its alternative to titanium dioxide in the trade press on the grounds that the latter had been ‘flagged up as a possible cancer risk’.
One’s instinct is to applaud the more forward-thinking food manufacturers who ditch colourings that have a question mark hanging over them long before any regulator gets around to making them do so, particularly if they then substitute them with something considered to be more natural. But that last word means different things to different people. Unfortunately for consumers who crave cut and dried information about food, but happily for food manufacturers who prefer a lot of wiggle room, there is no legal distinction in the EU between synthetic colours and natural ones. A startling omission, when one considers the sheer weight of regulation that governs our food supply chain.
For its own purposes, the food industry divides colours into two broad categories. Firstly, there are ‘chemically synthesised colours’. This category includes two further sub-classes: artificial (fake) colours, and ‘synthesised colours’, sometimes known as ‘nature identical’, which are chemically identical to natural pigments, but do not come from them. Secondly, there are ‘natural’ colours derived from natural sources.
Confused yet? For those not initiated into the language of food manufacture, the division between thoroughly fake colours and those that have some connection, however faint, with a natural substance, is about as clear-cut as an indistinct rainbow seen from afar through rain. ‘There is no clear definition of what constitutes a natural food colorant’, one flavour company explains, so it is ‘at the discretion of the food technologist and company developing the food product’.
In search of clarity, any food manufacturer can consult the guidelines drawn up by the Natural Food Colourings Association. It states the common-sense principle that to be described as such, a colouring must come from a pigment that occurs in nature – from plants, vegetables, flowers, algae, and so on. Fair enough. But then it goes on to say that the starting colour material can then be processed in three different ways: traditional/appropriate physical processing; traditional/appropriate physical and chemical processing; chemical synthesis.
The unthreatening word ‘traditional’ has a nice, low-tech ring to it, but bear in mind that in the world of food manufacturing, it is generally taken to mean any practice that has been going on for 30 years. So anyone who isn’t a food technologist, or chemist, might be surprised by what the food colouring industry means by the term:
A ‘traditional process’ … includes, but is not limited to, grinding, cutting, maceration, solvent extraction, microbiological fermentation processes, heating, cooling and freezing, drying, filtration, distillation, rectification and others. A traditional process is often, but not necessarily, a physical process and can or cannot involve chemical reactions which are usually, but not always, unavoidable and unintentional.