DELICIOUS food is synonymous with pleasing appeal in the presentation of any dish, but people’s peculiarities about some types of food could be costly and misleading.

Consumers prefer foods that are reddish or brightly coloured. Most food labels have red, green or yellow, even if the content is white, grey or darkly coloured. The aesthetic appearance is important to the craving for the products.

Many food outlet establishments use dyes like carbon monoxide, lycopene, etc on meat such as beef to give it a bright-red appearance. Beef looks brown when not exposed to oxygen, but turns red when it’s exposed to oxygen because of a protein in meat called myoglobin, which binds to oxygen and changes the meat colour. Pork undergoes a similar process of dying to perk up the appearance so as to attract consumers.

Food dyes are as ancient as food itself but the dyes of former times were not laboratory-made and came from nature, such as the case with annoto, cranberry juice, turmeric etc which all have good antioxidant properties and redound to the recommended health benefits of the user.

The face of food is evident in other food types like milk and eggs. Recently, a documentary from USA erroneously revealed that consumers of chocolate milk believe that the drink comes from brown cows, but the milk of hypotimus is pink despite the animal being blackish in colour, while the milk from Holstein cows is lilly-white even though the cows are black and white

The puzzle is that most cattle feeds are not the same colour of the milk, and neither are their meats.

Chocolate milk from brown cows is not a farfetched assumption given that brown eggs come from reddish layers (Rhode Island hens) while white eggs come from white layers (leg horn).

Consumers in Jamaica have a greater preference for brown eggs over white eggs, despite there being no nutritional differences between the two types.

It is more economical and profitable, however, to produce white eggs as the birds produce one dozen eggs from 3.5 to 4 lbs of feed while the reddish hens produce the same dozen eggs from 4 to 5 lbs of feed. Feed is the major input contributing to costs in poultry layers operations, accounting for 75 per cent.

Besides, the laying life of a white bird is much longer than that of a reddish hen — which makes restocking the red variety more frequent and more costly.

The poultry industry uses about US$140 million in feeds per year, although most poultry imported inputs are attributed to the broiler side of the business because the layer operation has about one million birds under management compared to about 50 million broiler birds annually, from which meat production is 136 million kilogrammes per year.

Based on the heavy import input cost for poultry and animal feeds, in an economy with foreign exchange shortages, government agencies like Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) and Jamaica Dairy Development Board (JDDB) need to mount an aggressive public education programme to encourage a preference for white eggs due to economic factors, since the nutritive value of white and brown eggs are the same.

Also, like sausages and hamburgers.

The face of food is changing from that which is genetically altered to laboratory- cultured food, and the consuming public must be better informed in order to make healthy and economic choices.

The face of food is as relevant to crop types as it’s to meats and eggs. There is distinct preference for yellow yam above other yams like Negro, Lucy, tau, and the soft yams. These yams have the same nutritive status as suppliers of carbohydrates (starch) in the same way that rice, flour and cornmeal supply carbohydrates but are imported, putting the macroeconomic infrastructure at risk by using scrace foreign exchange to source these items.

The colour of sweet potatoes is also important to consumers. The yellow-flesh variety is more attractive and costly than white-flesh potatoes but the nutritive values are similar as suppliers of carbohydrates.

In fact, all starches are used by the body as glucose molecules.

Again, consumers should, “Grow what we eat and eat what we grow.” This would foster self-sufficiency and encourage import substitution.

Consumer education is vital in order to impact behaviour and self-reliance when it comes to food security and sovereignty.

Lenworth Fulton is a former president of the Jamaica Agricultural Society.