Have you ever wondered why we dye butter and cheese yellow or orange? This isn’t merely a common cosmetic convention- this was so important to dairy consumers that for years (and up until very recently in Quebec) there were laws in many states (backed by dairy companies) dictating that margarine could not be colored, or instead, that it be dyed pink. As you know if you were ever given the task as a kid to make butter from a carton of cream and a Mason jar, butter isn’t yellow either- like untreated margarine, it’s white, the color of all plain, homogenous fats. So what’s up with the yellow? Why is this so attractive to consumers?
If you guessed that the answer winds down eventually to “evolution”, you know me well. Have a cigar! Or a Kewpie doll, if you don’t smoke.
Although the sensory hardware in biological organisms can be extremely complex- for example, recent research is showing the sense of smell to be based on a sort of rough-and-ready molecular spectrometry that actually analyzes the molecular vibration frequency of compounds to determine what they should report them to the brain as- the level of analysis is much less so. The difference between a smell like caraway seeds and a smell like spearmint might actually be determined by the handedness (left-right orientation) of a molecule, but you don’t know that- you only know that they smell different, and that if you were choosing a candy, you’d rather have the spearmint.
This is because, rather than bog your brain down with the informational equivalent of a dense laboratory report for every sight, sound, or smell, it’s much simpler to connect your reactions and preferences to some obvious feature that tends to be strongly associated in the environment with something the body needs. You don’t look at a strawberry and think “My, I’d bet that berry is just full of valuable sugars, anti-oxidants, soluble fiber, and micronutrients”; you think “that looks juicy and sweet”. Given that the entire purpose of fruits for plants is enticing animals to eat them and thus enlist for seed-dispersal services, fruits have evolved to be visually distinctive and to be full of attractants meant to give the animal some kind of a payoff for bothering; thus, they tend to be bright colors or distinctive shapes or both, and they tend to come loaded with a biological bribe in form of sugars and nutrients.
Since brightly colored round objects that are sweet tend to only be applicable to fruits in a pre-agricultural, pre-civilization landscape, it was simplest for our brains to assume bright and sweet = something valuable that we should seek out and favor. Now that we’ve had several thousand years to innovate and get creative with our food, and discover the concept of “marketing”, we have things like the jelly bean- all the bright color and sweet flavor that our brains tell us is so desirable, but not a scrap of anything all that uniquely valuable to us, unlike the berry it’s passing itself off as to the brain. In fact, it’s even better than the berry- more of the payoff with less likelihood of the mild bitter flavors that the plant puts in the berry to ward off undesirables and preserve the berry better, and whose general flavor class we associate with poisonous things. Of course, it has almost none of the nutritional value of the berry, just simple sugars that modern humans already tend to get way too much of, but that’s not important to your brain’s simplified sense of “good”.
In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness that biologists, anthropologists, and nutritionists hung up on this concept like to reference, salty and fatty flavors were associated almost exclusively with meat, and not just meat, but the highest-quality parts. Wild carnivores (and ancient human hunter-gatherer cultures that have decided this Western civlization business is for obese blowhards) don’t go for the skeletal muscle meats first. In a wild animal, those are a nice store of protein, but not nearly as good a source for valuable fats and nutrients as the organ meats. They go for the really good parts- the liver, which stores a lot of glucose and fat and is stuffed with vitamins, the brain, and all the other “good for you” wobbly bits disdained by children everywhere. Human technology has distilled this salty, fatty incentive into the pork rind, among other things.
So what of the butter, and the cheese? Aren’t they white, without chemical treatment? The answer is that they are now- but not for the vast majority of humanity’s time with dairy animals, which were among the first domesticated, after the dog. I’m getting to it…
In order to produce more meat with less cost in time and space, the vast, vast majority of livestock are now raised in various industrial conditions, and fed on grain. The animals are not as healthy or as durable on this diet- ruminants like cows especially tend to be chronically ill on that starch-rich diet*- but it’s much more cost-effective overall, and has been one of the things that has made meat such a cheap and normal part of the diet in an affluent first-world society. A common vegetarian ethical and environmental objection to meat is that you waste resources by feeding an animal on grain rather than just eating the grain- but that isn’t so on the traditional method for raising cattle, sheep, and goats, which was pasturing them and letting them eat grass, a substance largely worthless to humans except in an ornamental or erosion-preventing capacity.
Since nutritionists figured out that the differences between fats are important, and that some of them are extremely important to us because we can’t produce them ourselves, the “essential fatty acid” has entered the average health-conscious American’s lexicon. Since one of the two, omega-6 fatty acids, are really very common in any carnivore’s diet, the less common, the omega-3 fatty acid, has become the latest nutritional holy grail. Since omega-3 is relatively uncommon except in certain kinds of nuts and seeds and seafood, especially salmon, after the importance of the omega-3 came to prominence, fish oil supplements (of which you must choke down thousands of milligrams daily for efficacy) have invaded the shelves, salmon steaks are in demand, and everybody that wants to get a premium for their food has been pumping extra omega-3 into it, whether it’s in a form that can actually be used by the eater or not.
Since the omega-3 fatty acid’s importance to brain development and function was learned, it even created a problem for anthropologists working to piece together human evolution- if we need this stuff so badly to make big brains, and the story of hominid evolution is increasingly big brains, how could we have evolved and survived on prairies, savannahs, plains, and other areas that weren’t directly coastal? We know from shell middens that hominids of all sorts liked seafood, but it seemed like there were too many inland populations for it all to make sense.
The problem for the anthropologists was that the societies that produce anthropologists, and the chemists that are able to analyze the ratios of various different kinds of fats in a nicely marbled piece of steak, are the same societies that had long since upgraded to the efficient industrial model of livestock keeping. The average supermarket steak doesn’t have enough omega-3 in it to explain how hominids got eggheaded chasing buffalo with spears instead of salmon with fishing hooks- but pastured beef**, and wild game meats from other grazing animals, do. The chemical toolkit to make them is found in chloroplasts- in the grass that a grazing animal consumes bucketloads of.
What does any of this have to do with yellow butter and cheese? Dairy milk is influenced heavily in chemical composition and flavor by the diet of the animal making the milk- and it was long recognized in agricultural societies that used dairy products that the butter and cheese made during the spring and summer, when the cows and goats and sheep and water buffalo were enjoying the richest pasture and browse, was infinitely superior to the winter dairy made when the animals were being fed on hay and grain- and that summer dairy IS yellow with no dye whatsoever required. Why? The omega-3s that make it into the milk as well as the meat- they give an overall yellow tint to the fats they’re blended with. The higher the percentage of omega-3s, the stronger the yellow tint grows and edges toward orange. If you see omega-3 eggs in the grocery store, which are created by giving chickens feed heavy in the high-omega-3 grain flax seed, their yolks are bright orange.
With biological evolution prodding us toward the intense yellow or yellow-orange egg yolk, and cultural evolution prodding us toward the yellow butter and the most intensely yellow cheeses as the best-quality, without realizing it we have innovated to entice our senses with the implicit promise of value yet again: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and the Kraft Single or Velveeta cube take their place next to the jellybean and the pork rind.
*You’ll note that horses, which are physiologically less committed to grass-eating than cows, are fed primarily on hay with a grain supplement. They’re required to be healthy and athletic to be useful, and too much grain makes them sick as well as fat. Cattle are supposed to be fat, and poor condition and immunity can be dealt with with lots of antibiotics…
**I don’t normally link to sites that are trying to sell something, but their list of citations is much more complete than I could find on any of the kinds of online web sources I prefer to link. Most of the material I originally read this in is printed on paper and sitting on my shelves.
