Don’t Eat The Blue Stuff — Or Yellow Either!

I was in college when I convinced my parents to let me spend a hunk of my Christmas vacation  with my girlfriend Susan and her family in Bucks County, PA. I assured my folks that we would do a lot of cultural and intellectual kinds of things.  We would go to the symphony, where I could see Eugene Ormandy conduct some Tchaikovsky.  We would do the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall — great because I loved the Founding fathers so.

I bought a little gold plated Liberty Bell, which I so loved that I wore it around my neck for many years when the gold plating had long worn off.

Her father, a design engineer, loved making toy soldier models which My-Father-Of-Blessed-Memory loved collecting.  Susan’s father had told her to tell me I would bring home a new soldier for my father — that clinched the deal for sure.

We did not, however, tell my folks that her sister would take us, with her boyfriend, to a very trendy bar in Philly.  I could drink a bit — I was the guest.

I probably could have told my parents.  Curiously enough, they seemed to have nothing against alcohol, and seemed to always have at least a little whiskey at home, as well as the requisite ritual wine.

When Susan and I walked into the bar, her sister suggested we taste “the blue stuff.”  Blue had been my favorite color as long as I could remember, but I certainly knew nothing of anything blue one could drink.

It was “blue curacao,” something from the Caribbean, I was told — sweet, and good for women.  Susan and I each had a couple.  I was psychologically ready to be knocked out cold, even though the liquor had been considerably diluted and I “nursed” it for hours  — or should I say “doctored?”  No – that has an entirely different meaning.

We went home, giggly (me more than she) and we did not have to get up the next day.  Somehow we looked at and discussed and tried to chart the heavens.  I think I was up until 2:30 or 3 AM.  I don’t remember what stars we found above Bucks County, PA.

Last I heard about her, she was some kind of astrophysicist.

She loved the heavens more than I, long before that night.

Curaçaois a liqueur flavored with the dried peel of the laraha citrus fruit, grown on the island of Curacao.

I have never found, let alone tasted this drink, before or since.

It does raise a few questions, at least in my case, concerning the role of color in the choice of alcoholic drinks.

Sometimes later, in France, when I was a singer performer in clubs once in a bit, I would take a little “Izarra,” a richly aromatic herbal liqueur that was very, very green.

I remember it as being French Basque in origin.  There were yellow and green kinds, too.  Somewhere about 80 proof, but since it dated from around the turn of the century, ‘Belle Epoque,” the period I loved, it is not impossible that, too “colored” my preference. The original liqueur was naturally green or yellow – without artificial colors being added.

With blue curacao, there is little doubt in my mind that the blue I experienced came from none other than Brilliant Blue #1. The fact that someone cares enough to try to come up with a natural alternative, something as wildly healthy as spirulina (which I think I once tried as a supplement) is a good indicator.

Well, at least mildly healthy.  It certainly has lots of protein and was a traditional food source for the Aztecs for a few hundred years.  It has got a bunch of other nutrients which I think one can find elsewhere, too.  But safer than an artificial food coloring — yes, I would give it that vote.

Few people seem to note — let alone show interest in — the colorings added to food.  There are seven that the FDA seems to be letting by at this juncture.

I never read the label on that bottle of Blue Curacao.

See, I do get smarter with age.

Even if I somehow had, ingredients are listed on labels in descending order of importance.  If they actually were listed quantitatively, I suppose the cost of the product would skyrocket.

I cannot vilify the food industry; I imagine them as neither worse nor better than anyone else.  Color may have been a factor in my choice of alcoholic drinks—way back when—but I never drank very much.

I believe color plays a role in food choice for lots of people.  I think most of them are small and their brains have not developed terribly much — little children.

I cannot count how many I have seen with sacks of rainbow-colored gummy bears or other candy.  How many children love macaroni and cheese — quick and cheap to prepare, with brilliantly – even fluorescent — colored yellow-orange cheese?

I have seen little children at the supermarket pick up their own boxes of snack crackers, similarly brilliantly colored.

Okay, so there is a little bit of research on this.  We don’t know how much is in anything, and we certainly don’t know how much is consumed.

Just as an aside, I still consume a little bit of “brilliant blue,” or blue #1.  I often use diphenhydramine (generic Benadryl®) in the evening — quite a low dose, really, for the respiratory effects of having an air conditioner on at night, resulting in an uncomfortable stuffed nose.  This is a very old drug, so I buy a cheap generic.

It is baby-blue colored.  The coloring is, as is usually the case, the very last thing listed on the label, and not quantified.  It is of minimal utility, to help find the pills inside a small white plastic bottle.

I once had a pink brand, and now I have a blue brand.  I certainly am not staying up late at night trying to look at the stars over San Francisco Bay, nor having any other behavioral side effects that I (or my husband) have noticed.

But then again, I am an adult senior human with a brain that is already developed. All of this has not helped explain whatever happened that night on college vacation when my friend Susan and I looked so joyously at the Pennsylvania sky.

It was not the somnolence of alcohol intoxication, something I had experienced years before in my parents’ house with Passover wine.

It might have been due to that baby-blue coloring.

Now a study was done on mice and I am (I really believe this) human.  I will admit to accelerated spontaneous behavior that evening.  The mice who did this were female, too.

I was eighteen when this happened and I have no idea what that is in mouse years.

I suppose we could check with Minnie Mouse, but she has been around for around 80 years, last I heard.

Multiple sources suggest that about 15 million pounds of these dyes are in the food supply.

My next wonderment is where they all come from?  After turning the internet inside out, the best I can come up with is that they came first from coal tar, later from petroleum.

No matter how you cut this, it does not take a lot of leaps to figure that anything from that origin has no particular reason to improve your heath, and could be detrimental to it.

As I look over food additives, wanting to give a little more detail about what is going on, it seems that the difficulties in humans most often attributed to food coloring by those who consider them detrimental are allergic reactions, hyperactivity, and cancer.

There are several people who generally counsel “just don’t eat processed foods” but this is easier to say and harder to do.  If the food colorings that are legal in our country now (and often illegal elsewhere) became illegal, there is little doubt that major food producers would have to raise prices as they changed to “alternative” colorings (like spirulina for blue) and/or lose sales.

Poor Mommie is, of course, left to deal with the child who pulls a box of rainbow cereal or snacks of the shelf (attracted by a cartoon character from Saturday mornings on the package, of course) and somehow, even childless-me has the feeling that telling Junior “you will pay attention better in school” or even “You won’t have to worry about cancer when you are Mommie’s age” will just not cut it.