Comment by will4274

Other than bakery items, what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color? I don't see how that's anything other than a marketing tool to make them stand out on store shelves. When you order something in a restaurant, you typically don't even know what their version will look like until it gets to your table. I've never, not once, added dyes to home cooking outside of cake icings and things like that.

There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?

Nope, eating nothing but potatoes for the rest of your life is a fantastic way to ensure that you end up with severe macro/micronutrient deficiencies, which will be a very effective way of generating disease, including cancer.

For fun, you could grow your own seasoning (besides herbs, easy too) for those potatoes. I recently learned about the plant Salicornia - you can dehydrate them and grind them to make a green salt. I'm going to try to grow some this year.

>We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.

I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.

In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.