apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Hehe, this reminds me of my 7th grade science project, in which I gauged the reactions of classmates when I served them black cookies and blue lemonade.

My kitchen is blue and most of my dishware is white, blue, and green, yet I think I always eat with great enthusiasm. :)

I don't get it. How can orange signify eating with caution AND gusto? Also, i was always under the impression that green was an appetite suppresant (this is before the low-fat/healthfood machine adopted the color as their banner). If you wanted to eat less, put your food on a green plate, and it was supposed to curb your appetite.

Interesting. I've always heard that red has appetite-stimulating properties.

My dishware consists of mismatched second-hand plates, so it's rare that two people at my home are eating from the same color plate. Have I been randomly manipulating the appetites of my dinner guests all along without knowing it? When it's just me and my boyfriend, as it usually is, I tend to get a white or taupe plate and he gets black or cornflower blue. As much as I'd love to excuse my voraciously unladylike appetite with this information, I'm not sure I'm convinced! Perhaps an experiment is in order.

Also, thanks for providing me with a new desktop background. Those beets are beautiful!

I grew blue potatoes in my garen this year and they are so unappetizing.....even though they taste just like regular potatoes, I have the hardest time bringing myself to cook them.

Cobalt blue, at the very least, looks awful with food. I had blue glass dishes for years and everything served on them looked cold and less appetizing than it did in the beige ceramic dishes I also had.

My plates are green and I certainly don't find it an appetite suppressant. In fact, most food looks quite lovely on it.

I grew up in a household that used black octagonal plates for most of my teenage years, and blue plates before that, so maybe my brain is used to colored plates... None of it has stopped me from eating more than I should on many occasions. (:

mh330 - Sorry I left out the disclaimer on that one, Orange was a sign of hot or spicy foods (caution) and at the same time it was a color that encouraged eating with gusto.

mh330-
maybe it has to do with the shade of green? like a green with a lot of blue in it, might suppress it while a more yellow-y green encourages it.

i always heard blue shouldn't be used in a kitchen during my interior design classes. because it's the color of a lot of molds. and green and red encourage eating because a lot of fruits and veggies are green and red. and yellow is the most irritating color to the eye, so that's why fast food places use red, green, and yellow so much. like McD's for instance, red makes you want to eat, but the yellow wants you to get in and get out and be fast. [[i'm not saying any of this is proven fact. it's just what a guest speaker and our teacher told us. so don't shoot the messanger.]] ;)

I have an assortment of dishes as well, but the plates we use daily are black. I have always thought that when we serve foods with bright or light colors, things look fantastic against the black background, but when the food is darker in color, I have indeed noticed that it doesn't look as pretty.

I imagine all of this has to do with our instincts that would have helped to protect us when our ancestors were foraging for food - there are so few truly blue foods that it's no surprise to me that we don't take to blue-tinged foods as readily. Associated with foods, black also tends to conjure thoughts of spoilage, so I can understand the link between black and danger.

I tend to be skeptical of this sort of thing, and even more so of the idea that plate color affects amount eaten. Anecdotal evidence: my family eats mostly off of blue and violet plates and we eat more per-person than any family I've met.

Is this why I rarely snack at my sky blue table, but will instead pull a chair over to the off-white counter for avid snacking?

Interesting! I was watching a Food Network show the other day that described this. They mentioned how bright blue foods are usually poisonous, so that sends triggers to our brain to stay away. (They also mentioned that foods we typically think of as 'blue' - blueberries, blue corn, etc. - are actually purple).

Somebody could at least mention some of these poisonous blue foods? I cannot think of any and almost nothing is blue in nature (there is no blue pigment, if something is blue, like the feathers of a jay, it's because the physisical structures of a tissue reflect light in a peculiar way... if I remember well). On the other hand, lot of dangerous/toxic stuff in nature is red or yellow. A good reason for a blue kitchen: flyes don't like blue.
Personally I eat on blue or white plates, I like the blue better and possibly I eat less on them but just because they are smaller

It seems to me that the color of the food and the color of the dishes (or table, walls, etc.) would be completely different things. For that matter, light is different than color--the blue bulb in the refrigerator thing would make regularly colored foods look weird, so we wouldn't want to eat them.

If white is supposed to be mindless eating, how come when my college roommate described her mother's "white food" snack, we both gagged: iceberg lettuce with white sugar! (Family stories claim it's Norwegian.)

Personally, I want contrast in my food. Bright green lettuce with bright red & white radishes, orange/red tomatoes, brown and cream colored nuts, etc. (Drat! now I want a salad, and no lettuce in the house!)

Very interesting post. I design websites for home/garden brands. Warm colors seem to have more appeal to users in the food/recipes category. Think, gold, pumpkin, cranberry, plum and lots of warm neutrals. If green is used, its almost always a warmer shade. Rarely have I seen blue used in the food/recipe space.

I just stumbled upon this site and I truly love it - its now book marked as a favorite. The color chart for which foods to eat is very helpful. Thanks!

Courtney_182
www.shiftshappen-site.com