• Question: How do you make food colouring ??? :P

    Asked by gracerossiter to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 11 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 11 Nov 2012:

      There are lots of ways to make food colouring. Many of them come from animal, plants and rocks, while the rest can be synthetically made – we would need to ask a chemist about some of those. My own favourite example is from the cochineal insect. It feeds on cactus plants in Central America and produces a nasty tasting coating of carminic acid to keep birds and other predators away. This acid produces a very bright red colour that the Aztecs and Mayan people used to dye their clothes, makeup for their face and dye their food. The cochineal insects are collected from the cactus plants and mashed into a paste and then used as a dye. Since this is a very naturally occuring dye, people are starting to use it more so they can avoid the artificial chemicals that are used in many foods today.

      There are lots of other insects and plants used to colour food – nettles and spinach are useful for making your food green, beetroot is good for purple and blueberries for blue.

      But i think the cochineal insect is a great example of human ingenuity and the solutions that mother nature can provide.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      Like Andrew says, there are lots of different ways of making food colouring. Some are from natural things, like plants and the insects he mentions (ew!). Others are made in laboratories – it is possible to combine two different clear liquids together to get a colorful one. How cool is that!

      Have you ever heard that if you eat too many carrots, your skin will turn orange? Well, thats actually true! There are natural pigments found in foods like carrots (and in drinks like sunny delight) that give them their colour. They’re called carotenoids. They’re also what give flamingos their pink colour, when they eat different kinds of algae and shrimp.

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      I don’t, I buy it 😛

      Nature is full of natural dyes, mostly from plants and insects, which can be collected, mashed up and used as a dyes for clothes, make-up, paints and, provided it is safe to eat, food. Andrew’s example of the cochineal insect is really interesting and as Eileen said, flamingos get their characteristic pink colour from eating certain kinds of algae and shrimp. Did you know that as they can’t get enough of these algae and shrimp in Dublin zoo, the zookeepers mix special food colouring into their food? This is so they can keep their pink colour – important as their colours are important for them to communicate with each other.

    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      Natural dyes were the original ways of colouring food. Think of beetrout.
      But ofcourse modern chemistry has produced many many new ways of colouring food from chemical compounds.

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