The Blue Steak Experiment

I can definitely remember dark brown, red, yellow, green, tan.

Growing up, Bridget Lancaster's mother would sometimes put out a clear fishbowl of multicolored M ⁇ Ms.

Bridget, who's the host of the podcast Proof from America's Test Kitchen, didn't have a favorite color, but she had a least favorite one.

I probably separated them out and gave them to somebody else, you know, the tan MMs.

You set aside your tan for somebody else to eat because you didn't want them.

Yeah.

I mean, who wants tanned food?

Eventually, even MM didn't want tan food.

In 1995, it held a contest to replace the tan color with pink, purple, or blue, and blue won.

Within the next few years, Gatorade, Heinz Ketchup, Peeps, and more would be selling blue products too.

But the MM contest in particular generated a huge amount of attention.

We both remember it.

The year it happened, Bridget got a pack of the new MMs, now with blue, in her stocking.

I was anti-blue MM.

I have to say.

I was anti-change.

But, you know, as soon as somebody says, no, you can't have them anymore, all of a sudden I want them.

Can I tell you my M ⁇ M story?

Please, tell me your M ⁇ M story.

I was in high school or middle school.

It was like, I think there was like four of us wearing our peacoats.

It's very like the 90s.

And we bought a pack of blue M ⁇ Ms that was going to have this new color blue.

We knew we were doing that.

And we took, we bought it.

And one of the girls like pours it into her hand.

And we knew it was coming.

And we all genuinely shrieked, shrieked in joy.

Like just, it was so like

the marketing campaign worked so well.

We were overcome.

And we still were like, what a gorgeous MM.

Blue.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

These days, blue food is all over the snack aisle, but that wasn't always the case.

For the world's most popular color, for a color that can claim the sea and the sky, it took its time becoming a junk food and beverage staple.

Its slow stroll to the supermarket involves color theory, mid-century misinformation, electric blue food dye, and a make-believe flavor.

In today's episode, in collaboration with the podcast Proof from America's Test Kitchen, we're going to tell two stories that together explain why it took so long for blue food to become a market commonplace.

The first is about a blue food that we have come to love, and the second is about a blue food that we still think we don't.

So, today, on Decodering, what took blue food so long to catch on?

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Before we start, I want to set the table.

I want to talk about what sets blue food apart.

Why is there no blue food?

I can't find blue food.

I can't find a flavor of blue.

I mean, green is lime, yellow is lemon, orange is orange, red is cherry.

What's blue?

There's no blue.

That's George Carlin in 1975 on the first ever episode of Saturday Night Live.

He'd continued doing this bit for years.

It doesn't really work for me as comedy, but it does get to the fundamental thing about blue food.

It barely exists in nature.

Nope.

Not even in blueberries.

Oh, they say blueberries?

Uh-uh.

Blue on the vine, purple on the plate.

There's no blue food, eh?

Where is the blue food?

We want the blue food.

Most of the blue we see is a reflection or an iridescence.

It's blue because of how the light bounces off of something, rather than a pigment inherent in the thing itself.

So you see blue in bird feathers and butterfly wings, in the sky and the ocean, but it's rare in the plants and animals that we actually eat.

That means blue is a common color, but it's uncommon in food.

Historically, there have been two ways to think about this paradox.

The first, which was ascendant for much of the 20th century, is that this makes blue innately unappetizing, something we see and subconsciously associate with rot and mold and poison and don't want to eat.

But the second, which has always been lurking around, is that this unusualness might in the right circumstance make blue special, make it stand out, make it exciting.

The most concrete evidence in support of the first school of thought, the Blue is an absolute non-starter school, is a well-known study from the early 1970s.

Imagine you were in a windowless room, a clinical setting.

It's not unusual in any way, except that the lighting is low, and there's about a half dozen people in there who have agreed to participate in this focus group.

Joel Tannenbaum is a history professor at Community College of Philadelphia, and I think it's safe to say the world's leading expert on this experiment.

And everyone who's participating in the experiment is given a plate of food and the plates are all identical.

They have steak, peas, and some kind of fried potatoes on them.

So at around the 15 minute mark, everything's going well.

All of a sudden normal overhead lighting is restored.

This allows everyone to see their food much more clearly and they look down and they see that the steak that they've been eating is bright blue.

The peas are kind of a blood red.

And the potatoes are green.

Someone gets sick, someone gets angry, maybe someone, you know, throws a plate or some cutlery at the wall.

Bottom line is that people are reacting to this surprise appearance of their food with extreme displeasure.

This study, which first appeared in 1973, has been cited everywhere in academic papers and journals, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR, just about every lay story about how color affects our sense of taste.

And it's also widely known among food professionals.

And it seems to suggest, among other things, that there's something powerfully off about blue food.

We're going to return to this study in the second half of the episode.

But before that, we're gonna consider the best evidence in support of the other side of the blue paradox.

In support of team blue food can be appealing, saleable, and fun.

We're gonna look at blue raspberry.

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Now with new blue raspberry.

Blue raspberry is the electric blue, very sweet flavor you can find in Slurpees, ices, popsicles, sports drinks, gummies, lollipops, licorice, syrups, sucking candies, and more.

It is particularly beloved by children, not simply for its taste, but for the way it stains your tongue a vibrant, almost lurid shade of blue.

Though the internet will tell you there is a real blue raspberry, the white bark raspberry, this not-so-common varietal is even less blue than a blueberry, which as previously mentioned, is in fact a ruddy purple.

So our first story, how did blue and raspberry, two things with no connection in nature, become one flavor?

So I want to begin at the moment we became capable of making blue food in the first place.

with the invention of synthetic dyes.

In the 1850s, chemists were playing around with coal tar waste and actually discovered that they could create dyes from coal tar waste.

Carolyn Kobold is a historian and the author of A Rainbow Palette, How Chemical Dyes Changed the West's Relationship with Food.

The dyes they created from the coal tar waste were used as textile dyes, but they actually started going into food from about the 1860s.

Needless to say, eating dyes intended for textiles, to say nothing of a number of even more toxic additives, would occasionally make people really sick.

So in 1906, the American government started to regulate these dyes.

By that point, there were more than 900 textile dyes with off-label usages in food.

Rather than test all of them, the government decided it would be easier just to approve seven of them.

By the 1930s, that list had grown to 15 and it included blue dye number one, also known as brilliant blue, and red dye number two, a deep red color typically used with raspberry flavoring.

The standard story of blue raspberry's origin is all tied up with these two dyes.

There was big concern in the 1950s about one of the red dyes.

So at that point, people thought, oh,

what are we going to dye our raspberry sherbetty ice cream with?

Red dye number two would officially be banned as a carcinogen in 1976, but it was intermittently controversial in the decades before.

The story goes that during one of those moments of controversy in the late 1950s, the carnival supplier Gold Metal, based in Cincinnati, which invented the first reliable cotton candy machine in 1949, decided to stop using red dye number two.

But it still had all this raspberry flavoring, which it paired with blue dye number one instead, creating what a trade publication at the time referred to as a new blue raspberry flavor for snow cones and cotton candy.

At this point, blue cotton candy, called blue raspberry, joined pink vanilla as the default cotton candy shade and flavor.

But it wasn't until the 1970s, when red dye number two became really controversial, that two frozen treat companies, Icy and OtterPops, started making blue raspberry treats themselves.

And that's when the flavor really went mainstream.

In this version of the story, Blue Raspberry is a solution to a problem.

These companies have all this raspberry flavoring and nothing to pair it with.

So they turn raspberries blue.

It's blue as a last resort.

But what if it was more than that?

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Hey, I'm Candice Lem, and I'm Kate Lindsay, and we're the hosts of ICYMI, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

On a recent episode, we had to talk about a certain somebody's tweets, and that somebody happens to be my governor, Gavin Newsom.

If you haven't seen them recently, they've kind of gone, let's say, off the rails.

There was some Fox News host he just called a ding-dong.

It was

and as Slate's Luke Winky tells us, this isn't the first time the California governor tried to capitalize on the country's mood of the moment.

I'm in a group chat with some men from California.

Okay.

A male journalist who used to cover California politics.

And I just like, you give me a rundown of all the Gavin Newsome stuff.

And like one of the first three things he said was like archetypical performative mail.

So does that mean his shift to Trumpian tweets is actually working?

Find out by listening to the whole whole episode on ICYMI.

And be sure to follow ICYMI now wherever you get your podcasts.

The story about Blue Raspberry that, like, I had heard for a gazillion years, was that it had to do with red number two being pulled from the market.

Nadia Berenstein is a flavor historian, and when she started digging into where Blue Raspberry comes from, she came across a couple of relevant things.

The first is that very quickly, like back in the 1890s, when refined sugar production made rainbow-hued penny candies a commonplace, manufacturers understood that brightly colored foods were especially appealing to children, even if they had no specific flavor.

The color alone was a draw.

By the 1920s, this knowledge was showing up in beverage trade journals, where Nadia found an article noting that at fairs and carnivals, kids were much more likely to buy a fuchsia-colored lemonade than a regular one, even when the taste was the same.

By the 1950s, as major corporations were starting to target different portions of the market, there's all this lay evidence that a bright color like blue might actually help a product stand out, especially to kids.

And that seems to be where blue raspberry really started as a way to make a treat stand out during the post-war ice cream boom.

The earliest blue raspberry flavored things start appearing in like the early 1950s, and they're usually ice creams.

There's an increasing number of like frozen, delicious things to eat, And people have freezers so they can buy ice cream at stores and bring them home, right?

So there's just more competition in that space.

In a newly jammed freezer aisle, blue is going to pop.

By 1955, the Popsicle Corporation, the company that has a trademark for that name, was advertising a new blue raspberry double-pop popsicle a few years before it started showing up in cotton candy and snow cones.

But there was another thing inspiring blue raspberry as well.

The 4th of July.

They think that the desire

to make

red, white, and blue frozen ice cream desserts is like a thing that kind of like births blue raspberry.

The first ads that Nadia has seen that mention blue raspberry are for tri-colored patriotic treats in red, white, and blue, where the blue is blue raspberry.

You can still buy patriotic-themed ice cream concoctions like this.

This past summer, I got a July 4th themed carton with vanilla vanilla for white, some kind of strawberry sorrel for red, and for the blue, of course, blueberry chip.

So this is where the blue raspberry saga just really elevates for me into an A-plus brain teaser.

The blue raspberry was not created to deal with this glut of raspberry flavoring, but instead to fill out the American flag.

Why isn't it blueberry?

I know I've said blueberries are not really blue.

And sure, there's some poetic justice in blue, which does not naturally exist in fruit, being so closely associated with a totally made-up fruit.

But come on, why not blueberry?

I love this story because it's so counterintuitive.

Why won't you pick blueberry?

It's right there.

Right.

Yeah, that's the other thing.

Blueberry also has this crazy story.

I mean, or I think it's crazy because blueberry seems like such a standard fruit now.

But not so long ago, really,

they were an odd fruit.

Wild blueberries are native to North America and they grow robustly in the Pacific Northwest and all along the eastern seaboard, but they proved very difficult to cultivate.

It wasn't until the 1910s and 20s that they were domesticated.

There were wild blueberries in places like Maine that you could get locally or regionally, but it wasn't a fruit that people

around the U.S., much less around the world, were familiar with.

In 1939, Americans were eating about 20 million pounds of blueberries, most of them wild, half canned or frozen, which sounds like a lot until you learn that at the same time, we were producing 400 million pounds of table grapes and 46 million pounds of figs.

Dried figs were twice as popular as blueberries.

Kills me.

And by 1961, our blueberry intake had only gone up to around 24 million pounds.

Today, we're at 660 million pounds.

Felt like blueberries were unknown.

Blueberry Pie was popular.

There was the 1946 children's book, Blueberries for Sal, which is all about hunting wild blueberries.

In 1964, Roll Dolls, Charlie, and the Chocolate Factory included a character who turns into a blueberry.

And there was also Fats Domino's 1940 song, Blueberry Hill, which was covered by Elvis, Celine Dion, Louis Armstrong, and Led Zeppelin, among others.

But basically, into the 1950s, blueberries were not even figs.

There was just whole swaths of the country where using a raspberry to connote blue instead of a blueberry would not have been the affront to common sense that it is today.

By 1980, though, the world was starting to look more familiar, blueberry-wise.

That year, Jellybelly, a company that had existed since 1898, finally developed its very first blueberry-flavored jelly bean when they needed a blue-colored bean to include in a red, white, and blue display from Ronald Reagan's inauguration.

Still, all these years later, blueberry remains a relatively rare candy flavor.

It's not nearly as common as artificially flavored grape, cherry, strawberry, or even blue raspberry.

You can get blue raspberry jolly ranchers, for example, but not blueberry ones.

I find it difficult to even conjure up its taste compared to these other artificial flavors.

It's like the space that a blueberry candy should be.

It's not there because blue raspberry is there instead.

All of this suggests that the blue food debate should have been over in the 1970s when blue raspberry became a best-selling freezer pop flavor.

But oddly, that wasn't enough to put blue over the top.

It would take another 25 years for blue to get out of the freezer section.

And the reason why is where we're going next.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Hey, it's Dan Koise from Slate.

I made a new word game, and I hope you'll come try it out.

It's called Pears,

like the fruit, pears.

I wanted to make a word game that rewards not only random ass Scrabble words, but the fun words that we use in our real lives.

Tankini, Dillweed, Gloopy, Twink.

We'll post a new game every day, and your job is to make as many words as you can, to find great pear words, and of course, to beat your friends.

If that sounds like you're kind of fun, head to slate.com/slash games to find pears today.

That's slate.com/slash games and look for pears.

So, for the second story in this episode, we're going to look at what Blue Raspberry was up against, a deep-seated skepticism about blue food.

One you can see expressed in that blue steak experiment I mentioned earlier in the show.

The steak that they've been eating is bright blue.

The peas are kind of a blood red, and the potatoes are green.

Someone gets sick, someone gets angry.

Joel Tannenbaum, the professor at Community College of Philadelphia, has become totally fascinated by this study.

He first read about it in the early 2000s, and he never forgot it.

He's not the only only one.

The blue steak thing where there was kind of some sort of color manipulation going on.

I've heard this story for a long, long time.

That's Bridget Lancaster, the host of Proof Again.

She's worked in food for many years, including at the magazine Cooks Illustrated back in the 1990s, which is where she thinks she first heard about this study.

I had brought in my fiesta wear plates just so we could have some sort of colored assortment.

of options for food styling.

And I had this cobalt, I have, still have this cobalt blue fiesta, which is beautiful and I gladly eat food off of it, but that has to be where the conversation started because people were saying no blue plates and pictures.

As this story has been swirling around food people, it's also been popping up in popular science pieces about blue food and sensory studies, the field that looks at how all of our senses, not just our taste and smell, impact how we experience flavor.

Sensory studies is why Joel Tannenbaum was interested in the study too.

He'd been teaching a food history course for a few years when he decided to put together a survey text based on what he'd been teaching.

And early on, I was working on a chapter about sensory studies, and I remembered the story that I had heard years ago and had, you know,

referred to passingly in lectures about this crazy experiment where they dyed food blue.

But when he went looking for it, he realized it was hard to find the original study.

The academic and non-academic articles that mention it cite the work of Wheatley, a Jay Wheatley.

So Joel went looking for Jay Jay Wheatley.

I confirmed that the author of this study was this woman named Jane Wheatley, and she published it in a magazine called Marketing in the early 70s.

And marketing was like a trade magazine, basically.

For the food industry, or like...

Oh, for the advertising and marketing professionals.

Jane Wheatley has gone on to have a long career in journalism, but in 1973, she was just an editorial assistant, the most junior title in a magazine.

The piece she wrote, a cover story, was titled Putting Color Into Marketing.

I had to get a friend of mine who's at a university in the UK to check this thing out of the British Library in their reading room, scan it for me, send it to me.

But I finally got my hands on this article, on a PDF of this article, and I was so excited.

And when I finally got to it, the whole recount of the experiment was, you know, was in the passive voice and it wasn't attributed.

It's the strangest thing.

It's just sort of an anecdote.

In other words, the blue steak study.

It doesn't seem like it really happened.

So we went down the rabbit hole with the study, obviously.

With Joel's help, we tried to figure out where it really comes from and we have a theory.

But before we get to it, I want to provide some context to explain what this study is really about, which is key to understanding why it's still with us.

So color matters to taste.

This has been proven in experiment upon experiment upon experiment.

Real ones, not this one.

But that's what this one shows too.

And that's important to people on both sides of the historical conflict about blue food I outlined at the top of the show.

It mattered the blue will never be popular because it's a natural side that was ascendant in the mid-20th century.

And it still matters that it's surprising and fun and can work in the right circumstances side that's ascendant now.

I'm going to give these sides more polished names.

The color consultants and the sensory scientists.

You may think you don't know anything about color consultants, but a lot of our most common ideas about what colors mean and do were popularized by them.

When I was talking to Bridget about the steak study, she immediately connected it to their work, which is still very much in the air.

I think it's part of the whole guru saying, if you want to lose weight, just eat off of a blue plate.

And then we hear about the edible colors, and that's why places like McDonald's are red and yellow, and those are the more appetizing colors.

This idea that red and yellow are appetizing and blue is not, that comes from the color consultants.

They first popped up en masse after World War II, a moment of ballooning consumer choice, when for the first time you could get lots of consumer goods in lots of different colors, and some of them were even being sold on color TV.

Corporations and advertisers needed guidance on this brave new world of color, and a cohort of psychologists, scientists, engineers, and marketers sprung up to advise them.

Their recommendations weren't based on a lot of hard science, but they were framed scientifically and authoritatively.

They would assert that colors had fundamental qualities and apply them to commercial contexts.

So, blue was associated with distinction and cold.

It could be sleep-inducing and sometimes depressing, but it was also thought to be well used in freezer aisles, in the packaging for red foods, and as the text on a yellow label.

They were solving for color, but the solution wasn't simple.

For blue, the cold thing was a particularly big deal.

The color consultants were really influenced by color theory and took to the idea of the warm colors, red and yellow, fiery and sunlike, and the cold ones, icy blue.

In the context of food, this was connected to appetite.

The warm colors were appetizing, while the cold ones were not.

This actually might explain why blue first popped up in the freezer aisle, the right place for a cold color, and also why its success there didn't immediately prompt other kinds of blue food.

It was the exception that proved the rule.

Blue belonged in the cold.

These ideas about color and appetite are still in circulation.

So needless to say, they were really in circulation in the 1970s, right around when the blue steak study was first published.

Go back to the 60s and 70s, and the sort of marketeers and the cultural commentators were all suggesting that you'd never be able to sell a blue drink or a blue food.

People just wouldn't buy it.

Charles Spence is a prolific gastrophysicist and the head of the cross-modal research laboratory at Oxford University.

He does sensory studies, which, unlike color consulting, are scientific, based in experimentation and data.

One of his most famous studies showed that the sound of a potato chip, the quality of the crunch when you bite into it, affects how good people think that they are.

Another found that having a black or white coffee mug changes how intense and how sweet the drinker finds their coffee.

Spence has done a lot of work with blue and companies developing blue products, and he thinks that in the right circumstances, blue food can work really well, set the product apart, and work outside a taster's expectations.

But even he likes the blue steak story.

You could take it as perhaps one of the most powerful examples of the visual appearance of food and what it can do to us.

Svenz has cited it in a number of his academic papers.

He shot a pilot for a TV show where they riffed on it by serving blue sushi, which he says no one wanted to eat.

And in the mid-2000s, at a conference at Oxford, he put together a blue dinner for about 50 people where they played Miles Davis's kind of blue and served blue chicken and bread.

In a world where many of us still think of a blind taste test as the gold standard for assessing flavor, where you treat the visual as something clouding flavor, not a part of it, Spence sees this study as dramatic evidence to the contrary.

It's exciting and important to me.

It says, yeah, this is how powerful color can be.

And my colleagues in the world of flavor perception and food who say, you know, well, what you see isn't part of flavor.

I can't believe that changing the color of something would change the taste.

Well, you know, how about this as an example?

For Spence and most of the people who cite the study, the germane thing about it isn't the blue, though that may be the most distinctive detail.

The steak could be purple or green or any color steak isn't naturally and it would make the point they care about.

Color impacts flavor.

And actually, the steak has been a lot of other colors in the stories and studies that got blended together to make this one, we think.

Let's dive in.

Okay, this is how the blue steak study is described in the 1973 piece in which it first appeared, the source that launched it out into the world.

Several people were collected around a table in a special form of lighting which showed the food on the plates in front of them, but not its color.

After they had consumed some of the meal, normal lighting was resumed and the subjects found the steak was blue, the peas red, and the chips green.

Almost all were violently sick.

That's all.

There's no more detail.

Its own citations don't lead to a more detailed experiment.

It's an example, less than a paragraph in a multi-page, many thousand-word story that's basically a straight-up color consulting story, trying to explain to advertisers how important color is and the various ways it works.

This story does come in a paragraph about how color is contextual and memory-based.

It concludes by saying kids probably wouldn't have this strong of a reaction.

But it also comes with a chart, a little infographic that lists in a word or two what colors mean to people in various countries.

Blue is again reduced to cold.

Joel had been hoping for more.

If not, you know, a study with data, then at the very least, like some concrete information about when it had happened and where it had happened and who the participants were and who conducted the study.

And there was none of that.

Joel tracked down the author, but she didn't remember much about it.

It was almost 50 years ago, and it's just a couple sentence anecdote in a piece that's about something else.

But Joel kept digging around.

He talked to a lot of people, and he eventually wrote about all of it for Gastronomica.

The piece called Blue Steak Red Peas argues, among other things, that one of the reasons this study has proved so sticky is because it taps into our anxieties about shady food manufacturers and synthetic additives, which I think there's something to.

Anyway, that's how he got in touch with the podcast Proof, who put him in touch with us.

And we did some more digging to the point that we now have a very provisional working theory of where the blue steak story comes from.

We think it's three other stories mixed together.

The first one is about an early type type of sensory study.

So Joel got a lead from the British historian Sally Horrocks, who sent him a newsreel clip taped at the experimental kitchens of the UK's Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Fisheries.

In it, you can see women serving food to subjects who are sitting at little cubicles that have gel lights above them.

When switched on, they turn all the food beneath them, various bowls of grayish soup, red or green, depending on the filter.

So yeah, so they actually, there's footage at the end of it of this guy being served a tray of what looks like airline food or hospital food, some kind of institutional food.

And then someone changes the light above him and he kind of puts his fork down.

The newsreel Joel is describing is from 1959.

When I spoke with Nadia Berenstein, the flavor historian who I also talked to about Blue Raspberry, she said this kind of experiment goes back to World War II.

That's when the American armed forces were some of the first people in the world to live on a diet of largely processed food.

To figure out how to make that food appetizing, the Army assembled a number of food scientists and psychologists and engineers to do experiments on flavor, often done in deodorized, pressurized cubicles under lights to isolate the subject's sense of taste.

Nadia Berenstein again.

So sometimes tasters will be doing this work under like red lights, kind of like in a dark room, so that everything looks gray, gray, so that color differences will be extinguished.

I think this is where the idea of experiments in which you shine colored lights on food comes from.

But the gist is there.

The details are not.

The food itself is institutional and drab.

There's no steak or peas or potatoes.

Also, no puking.

But most of those things are in the story about a dinner party attended or thrown by a man named Louis Cheskin, a big-time post-war color consultant.

Cheskin was a psychologist, marketer, and researcher who was known for soliciting input from actual customers, for being more scientific in his methods than some of his peers.

He ran something called the Color Research Institute, wrote a number of books, and was apparently fundamental in advising Marlboro to rebrand their cigarettes as Manly.

He also told McDonald's to keep their golden arches for their Freudian implications.

He called the arches Mother McDonald's McDonald's breasts.

One night, after following a citation from a paper about food color, I was looking through the text of one of Cheskin's books, Colors, What They Can Do for You, which was published in 1947, 23 years before Wheatley's article came out.

While skimming through it, I came across this story.

The enjoyment of eating is governed by the color almost as much as by the taste of food, as was demonstrated recently at a dinner party given by a lighting engineer.

On the banquet table, when the guests took their seats, were dishes filled with the finest and most appetizing foods.

Suddenly, the illumination was switched from white to colored lights.

The steak took on a bilis gray color, the celery turned extremely pink, salads were converted into a muddy violet, the green peas looked like oversized black caviar, the milk turned blood red, the eggs blue, and the coffee a sickly yellow.

Most of the guests immediately lost their appetites.

Those who forced themselves to eat the food became ill.

I think this dinner party experiment is the one Wheatley is citing.

Variations of it show up in a number of Cheskin's other books as well.

It's not just that the stories are so similar.

It's that a Cheskin book is exactly the kind of thing someone writing about color for marketers in 1973 might have been reading, because that's exactly who Cheskin's books were for, too.

Still, there's one key element missing from the Cheskin anecdote.

The steak's not blue.

How'd it turn blue?

I think one answer might be Alfred Hitchcock.

I once gave a dinner party

many years ago

where all the food was blue.

That's the director on the Dick Cavett Show.

He hosted this infamous party in a private room at the Trocadero, a she-she London restaurant.

It was a full meal.

It was

chicken soup, blue, blue, blue trout,

blue chicken,

and blue ice cream.

And when you broke open your roll, the braid was blue inside.

Hitchcock threw this party in the 1930s and another one in the 1960s.

But the Dick Cavett appearance was in 1972.

And he also told the story in a print interview in 1970, which are both just a few years before the blue steak story was published.

Did you explain this, or did you just not comment on it?

Not comment on it at all.

How far

Even in the blue doesn't come directly from Hitchcock.

He's not eating steak, you might have noticed, but chicken and trout.

I think Hitchcock, a grade A self-mythologizer and a master of the eerily showstopping's interest in blue underscores the truth about this color, which is as at the grocery aisle, it makes whatever it touches stand out.

Even a story.

It's just better, weirder, more memorable because blue is involved.

So that's our working theory.

Sensory studies and color consulting bump into each other by way of Alfred Hitchcock to create this Frankenstein anecdote that gets passed on and on because even though it's made up, it tells us two things that are true.

Color matters and blue food is special.

So to return to where we started, why did it take so long for blue food to catch on?

I think mid-century skepticism and blue raspberry jockeyed for way longer than it seems like they should have until blue's potential as an attention-grabbing novelty finally exceeded concerns that it might be off-putting.

In the 1990s and aughts, blue jumped out of the freezer and there was an explosion of the color with Eminem, Kool-Aid, Gatorade, and eventually even Heinz Ketchup going blue, in Heinz's cases, along with a host of other shades.

We haven't looked back since.

But it's not as though we know for sure now that people like blue food.

There's been a number of studies that show it can be off-putting.

It really is still mostly a sweet for kids, and we're nowhere near eating blue steak.

It's still weird.

It's just that manufacturers and marketers have a greater understanding of how blue's unusualness can be worked to a product's advantage.

That's another way to think about blue's slow creep into stores, as tracing food companies' growing awareness that Americans are more willing to try new things than they once thought.

The gag of surprise and the thrill of victory, they just might be one bright blue tongue apart.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Before we go, I have a scheduling announcement.

In 2021, Decodering is going to be going seasonal.

That means you won't hear from us for a while, but we will be back in the summer with a whole season's worth of brand new episodes, which will come out every week.

We're very excited to try something new and we are really appreciative of you waiting to hear it.

Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show.

We will be back in not that long.

In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter at Willipaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

Also, I want to encourage you to check out Proof from America's Test Kitchen.

They look into cultural mysteries about food, and you can listen to Proof wherever you're listening to this.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willip Haskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch.

Dakota Ring is produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Caitlin Kelleher and Sarah Joyner at the Proof team, to Susan Murray, Aihi Sano, Mayan Zilberman, Jim Minnick, Greg Cheskin, Eli Lewis Bader, Rebecca Fetterman, June Thomas, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

See you in 2021.

Have a great new year.