nano,all foods that are heated up are infrared!
Just because George Carlin made a good routine out of it doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting question!
With one exception, every “blue” food I’ve ever seen was either artificially colored or not very blue at all: Blueberries – blackish purple (juice does get pretty blue in contact with something basic, like baking soda; blue cheese – blue-greenish gray; blue corn chips – blue gray, tending towards purple. The one exception was Borrage flowers, used as a garnish on salad.
Blue pigments seem to be rare in nature. IIRC, among traditional artists’ pigments the blues are both the most expensive and the least light-fast. I’d try to explain this as the result of the pigments absorbing lots of high-energy photons, but it seems to me that this should make RED pigments the most unstable…
C’mon, blue is blue is blue. If you apply a sufficiently narrow definition , you might as well say there is no green food; celery is greenish white, spinach is greenish black, broccoli is greenish grey, etc. “Bluish” equals blue in my book; ergo, blueberries, blue corn, et al, are all blue foods.
TT
“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide
Why there are not any good grammar?
I’m tempted to just respond that “blue is blue is blue, but blue corn isn’t.”
I guess all I can really say is that the foods mentioned do not fall within the range that fits my mental category “blue.” Actually, blueberries with the bloom (the powder, not the flower) still on do count as blue with me, but cooked or in fruit salad or whatever, the bloom is off, and the pigment color, which to me is purple, is what shows.
Anyway, the rarity of foods that are unambiguously blue seems to me to be a reflection of the rarity of blue organic pigments. I’d say “why are there [so few] blue foods?” really is a legitmate chemistry question.
what @ blue rasberry blowpops??? they are deffinately blue!!! eat one then look @ your tounge in a mirror. and also blue cotton candy.
Whatever!!! Just don’t screw up my life with your wicked stupid ideas!
In an episode of Chef! Everton loses a band-aid in the kitchen, and Blackstock has him put on a blue one from the first aid kit, saying (yelling, actually) that blue ones are used because there are no blue foods. I know there are blue foods, but I’m wondering, do restaurants really use blue band-aids?
Excuse me deus ex machina, are we to accept that the only unambiguosly blue foods are those that fall within the range that fits (your) mental category blue? That is the very definition of subjective judgement, and therefore not unambiguous. Please offer a more objective standard, such as an angstrom range in the visual spectrum; until then, bluish is blue is blue food.
TT
“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide
I can’t believe no one mentioned BOO Berry Cereal. Oh I wish they still made that.
Also the real answer is that blue food did exist. It was the fruit that hung from the tree of life in the garden of Eden. When God put the sword there no one could get it. Thus today we die because we couldn’t eat from the tree of life. So as long as there is death there will be no blue food.
This is probably a UL, but I remember hearing that the butter folks tried to pass a law when margarine was invented to require it (margarine) to be colored blue.
ThufferinThuccotash, I’m not trying to be contentious – color naming, as opposed to color description, seems to me to be inherently subjective. That’s what I meant by stating that all I could really say is that it doesn’t look blue to me.
By “unambiguously blue” I mean that region of the color solid that all (non-color-blind) observers agree is described by the word “blue.”
Quantitatively, I’d expect this to center on pigments that have a primary absorption peak in the 580-620 nm (orange) range. Add longer wavelength absorption, and you’ll get blue-greens, which I’d guess most observers would still call “blue.” Move toward the shorter wavelengths, say 550-580 nm, and I guess some people will say that the proper word is “violet” or “purple,” but others will still say “blue.”
I’m not sure what the effects of changing brightness and saturation would be.
So, for any chemists: Are organic pigments whose primary peak is around 580-620 nm inherently less stable than others? Or seem that blue is unusual because chlorophyll, hemoglobin, and the carotenes are so common?