Imagine watching a cooking show like The French Chef with Julia Child, where the vibrant colors of food bring dishes to life on screen.
When the show first aired in black and white, it entertained audiences, but when it switched to color, it made dishes like “Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise” look even more appetizing.
This highlights how color can change the way we experience food.
I’m a psychologist who studies how people see the world, and my research has led me to explore how color impacts our emotional responses to food.
Through this journey, we’ve uncovered an interesting connection: people who are colorblind seem to be less picky eaters, and we believe it has to do with how they experience food in a limited color range.
How People Recognize Food
My research began with the simple question: How well do people recognize different foods?
While it’s easy to understand that people might vary in their knowledge of birds or cars, it turns out there’s also a lot of variation in how well people identify and distinguish between food items.
To test this, we created experiments where participants had to match images of the same dish or find the odd one out from similar dishes.
As expected, people varied in their ability to recognize food, and some of this variation was explained by how good they were at recognizing other objects in general.
But there was more to the story.
We found that some of the differences in food recognition were related to people’s attitudes toward food, specifically food neophobia—the fear of trying new foods. People who were more picky, or food neophobic, performed worse on our food recognition tasks.
The Role of Color in Food Recognition
Around the same time, other researchers were studying how the brain reacts to food images and whether color played a role.
Some argued that brain areas involved in recognizing food were also responsible for processing color, while others said color wasn’t necessary for recognizing food.
Curious, we ran our own study using black-and-white images of food. The results showed that while people made more mistakes when color was removed, the overall pattern of how well they recognized food stayed the same.
Those who had a higher general ability to recognize objects still did better, but one thing stood out—food neophobia was no longer linked to how well people recognized food. This suggested that color plays a special role in connecting emotions, like fear or anxiety, to food recognition.
Are Colorblind People Less Picky Eaters?
Based on these findings, we made a bold prediction: people with colorblindness, who experience food in a restricted range of color, might be less picky eaters.
Without the full range of colors to trigger concerns about freshness or safety, we wondered if they might be more open to trying new foods.
To test this, we recruited participants online and included a question about colorblindness. Our participants didn’t know that we were studying colorblindness, but we then asked them to complete a survey measuring food neophobia—how resistant they were to trying new foods.
The results were clear: colorblind men reported lower levels of food neophobia compared to men with normal color vision.
In a follow-up study, we found that colorblind men were also less likely to report feelings of disgust toward food. It seems that seeing food in fewer colors reduces some of the emotional resistance that makes people hesitant to try new things.
How Color Affects Our Response to Food
Our research fits with what others have found about the role of color in food. Color helps us decide if food is safe to eat—whether it’s cooked properly or if fruit is ripe or rotten. People also tend to prefer meals with a variety of colors, and studies have shown that color can even influence how food tastes.
The relationship between color and food likely evolved over time. As plants developed bright colors to signal ripeness, animals—including humans—evolved to detect these colors to choose safe and nutritious foods.
Understanding the role of color in food perception opens new possibilities for helping people who struggle with extreme food neophobia. By learning more about how color influences our emotional response to food, we may be able to develop strategies to help picky eaters enjoy a wider range of foods.
Just as Julia Child’s colorful dishes elevated the experience of cooking, appreciating the role of color in food can enhance our enjoyment and improve our eating habits.
