on food dyes
complications between consumers, food industry, and government
Part of the thrill visiting the United States as a kid was seeing what shades of neon foods we could find. My favourite were the electric blues in cereals, juices, and candies I couldn’t find back home in Canada. While certainly not the defining element to understanding America, I have used it as a way of showing cultural differences when my daughter travels with me, too. She is fascinated by how vibrant their Froot Loops are.
Food dye and its relationship with consumer demands and appetites is fascinating. Given that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hellbent on re-establishing boundaries (erm, sort of) with what ingredients get mixed into American foods, I return to the idea that I dedicate entire undergraduate lectures on. I don’t mean to suggest that America can’t exist without the tensions and crises built on ingredients and dyes, but it certainly plays a pivotal role in how American foods and food production are maintained as a form of nationality. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to see it as a way of maintaining an ever-expansive capitalistic approach to its food system.
When I first took over teaching a course on nutritional anthropology, I was reluctant to explore the ideas of food dye and consumer behaviour. There was a tenuous balance of information and stigmatization then around body riddled a lot of the content around food dye. It is parallel to how it is discussed now by the fascist state under the Trump administration, though was the more liberal counterpart (where the harmful assumptions about food, body, race, and gender are implied rather than yelled).
Food dyes are a contested site of political and sociocultural behaviours. While bans of certain dyes are somewhat informed by scientific studies, sometimes whether they’re allowed for use is driven more by industry attitudes and responses to consumer appetite. In Kennedy’s mind, food dyes are poisonous and need to be banned. He recently placed Canada as an example of regulating these better, though it’s a bit more complex than he thinks.
dyes of concern & interest
There are eight food dyes that Kennedy and the FDA are moving to ban, though only one of those eight is banned in Canada (Orange B). The rest: Citrus Red 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, and Blue 2. These are currently permitted by Health Canada (our version of the FDA), though only specific thresholds on the amount and use of these dyes in food products. Health Canada is a federal agency that views it as a “shared responsibility among government, industry, and consumers.” Risk-based approaches are taken by Health Canada to manage food additives, and generally aligned with the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand.
So while the food dyes of concern are allowable (to some extent) in Canada, why are natural fruit dyes used more? This is at the discretion of the industry. If you look to breakfast cereals, Kellogg’s Canada has a different approach than Kellogg’s U.S. Froot Loops in Canada are coloured with concentrated carrot, watermelon, and blueberry juices for a rather subdued fruity bowl. In contrast, Kellogg’s uses artificial colours and BHT for the American Froot Loops, which are much more eye-catching.
The driving force behind these differences in cereal ingredients is unclear, beyond the consumer-driven adoption being more successful in Canada. But these changes were ostensibly driven by American boycotts of Kraft foods during the 2010s, which also included GMO products and milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormones.
The use of yellow food dyes has long been hotly debated, to the point where Kellogg’s stopped using artificial colours and flavours in their breakfast cereals in response. The rise during the 2010s in more label transparency and concern around food sources, and food ingredients, has informed this.
Important (and tangential) to these discrepencies is that Kellogg’s is reactive to consumer interests, despite being a company founded by Seventh Day Adventists who sought purity through food and temperance-based practices. John Harvey Kellogg’s saw meat, spices, coffee, cigarettes, and sex as things to avoid for spiritual purity, and infused these beliefs into his notorious Battle Creek Sanitarium. In some ways, perhaps we’ve come full circle with the puritanical food beliefs, and in others, so very far away.
consumer boycotts of kraft dinner
Consumer boycotts and loud concerns were voiced through social media during this time by so-called “mommy bloggers” and “web food bloggers.” Central to this was Kraft Dinner (or Kraft Mac and Cheese to my American friends), which used yellow food dyes to achieve the warm, kid-appealing hues.
In 2013, Lisa Leake and Vani Hari took on Kraft with an online petition, arguing that they “recently discovered that several American products are using harmful additives that are not use – and in some cases banned – in other countries… Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in the US contains the artificial food dyes Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. These unnecessary – yet potentially harmful – dyes are not in Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in other countries, including the YK, because they were removed due to consumer outcry.”
These concerns became amplified through their online platforms, bolstering discussions about breaking down ingredient lists and making sense of chemicals by concern parents.
In response, Mars, General Mills, Kellogg’s and other big food companies constructed promises to remove artificial colours from their food portfolios between 2015 and 2016, with the goals to met by around 2019. This included products from Mars such as Skittles, Starburst, and M&Ms, General Mills cereals Lucky Charms and Trix, and Kellogg’s Froot Loops and Apple Jacks.
Transitioning from brightly hued products to natural colours was one way for these companies to demonstrate their commitment to change. This meant that at least visually, food items were one step closer to having “clean” labels, seen as on pace with consumer interests globally at the time.
food babe vs science babe
One of the mommy bloggers that was featured in these earlier boycott calls, Vani Hari, is perhaps better known as the Food Babe. She self-describes as the number one enemy of big food, dedicating her writing, blogging, activism, and affiliate marketing (whoops!) towards criticizing the food industry. Importantly, her background is in computer science, not in nutrition or food science.
The Food Babe’s platform as a mother concerned for the welfare of her kids tapped into the market of concerns around chemicals in foods. She regularly used (and still uses) pseudoscientific logic to pry into concerns around food dyes, genetically modified foods, and other ingredients. Her main arguments orbit around general fear baiting that “secret toxic chemical ingredients” are “making her sick.” Despite controversy following her, these rallying cries have allowed her star to keep rising as she built up her “Food Babe Army” online.
Part of this lies in Vani Hari’s refusal to accept any form of well-meaning criticism or question about her knowledge sources. For years, she has controlled her narrative tightly, blocking social media followers asking questions, and rejecting the mainstream media takedowns. In response, chemist and toxicologist specialist Yvette d’Entremont cheekily called herself Science Babe and ran a scathing Gawker article, “Food Babe is Full of Shit.” What made Science Babe’s rebuttal so compelling is not that she attacked the science of what Food Babe was writing, but that she called out how unqualified Food Babe is to speak to these issues.
It was Hari that popularized the logic that hard-to-pronounce ingredients aren’t things people should eat, which has paved the way for the MAHA landscape of today. And to no surprise, in 2025 she is loudly mapping herself into the MAHA movement, crediting it with “crumbling the status quo of the establishment… to break free from the sickcare system that has been ruling in this country.” In 2015, articles that explored their feud made important distinctions about Food Babe’s relevance that feel like failed warnings returning a decade later.
empty pledges
Back in 2015, a Neilsen poll found that the global perspective of food dyes saw 42% of consumers placing importance in removing artificial colours and dyes from food globally. In contrast, only 29% of North Americans at that time found this to be important (the lowest regional percentage). By 2016, over 60% of Americans polled did consider artificial colours when making product choices.
Most of the food companies did not meet their food dye pledges by 2019. Companies researched consumer psychology and behaviour, and though they understood that consumers didn’t want artificial colours in their products, subsequent research indicated that natural colours weren’t performing as well as artificial colours on actual sales. This was, in short, bad for business. Duller colours didn’t sell as well as the vibrant ones.
Further challenges arose in the determination of natural and artificial colouring. Natural dyes are more costly, since more hue is needed to maintain the vibrancy of food products. The behaviours of natural food dyes are also less stable in foods and beverages, more reactive to light and heat. In contrast, artificial food dyes remain stable and more cost effective. What gets prioritized ultimately depends on the goals and market demands. That pledges were unmet is no coincidence: they were driven by the vague gestures of industry, rather than under any governmental or policy directive.
Diverse attitudes and responses to food products ultimately shaped how natural dyes got picked up regionally. For Europeans, the consumer concern about artificial colours has been consistently greater, with more warning labels are placed on products. In North America, it fluctuates. There was a decline in food product sales with natural dyes by 2017. General Mills brought back their original Trix colours. Then-CEO Jeff Harmening “pointed out strong growth numbers behind less-than-healthy breakfast options” like Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which hadn’t been subjected to natural dyes.
There’s usually little space for multiple factors in these press releases. How much of the decline in Trix was related to the broader trend away from breakfast cereals during this time? Wall Street Journal points to a steady fall in breakfast cereal sales, continuing now, despite a momentary uptick in pandemic popularity.
evidence for or against dyes
The data on the potential impact that food dyes have on human health is mixed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that “sugar doesn’t make kids hyper,” contrary to earlier beliefs that link hyperactivity, sugar, and ADHD. (For a great deep dive on these sugar-driven moral panics, check out
). But the stigmatized connections between this triad are maintained, largely so to avoid the impacts that social determinants of health, like poverty, instability, and environmental dispossession play on health outcomes.While sugar has been ruled out, the understandings about food dye are still in process. A 2004 study in the UK found generally adverse effects for children that consumed artificial food dyes, including Red 3. But these findings were limited in their application: the related behavioural changes would not be “detectable by a simple clinic assessment,” even if noticeable to parents.
Subsequent reports by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment have led comprehensive and multi-year studies on the matter. Their 2021 scoping report gathered available recent studies that make a connection between artificial food dyes and neuro-behavioural changes in some children. Some artifical dyes need new and lower thresholds to be deemed safe exposure. And similar to the UK study, they found that the connection between artificial food dyes and behavioural changes in children is not seen across all the studies they analysed. Many that do note that children vary in their sensitivities to artificial food dyes.
There are discrepancies between the evidence that organizations such as Health Canada and the US FDA have on food dye, and the actions and knee-jerk responses food companies have to consumer demands, concerns, and anxieties. In one way, this is a reminder of the power of public advocacy and agency. I used to teach this lesson framed in a positive light, where choices about how foods are made can be shifted by the power of the people.
Yet, as
outlines in her recent field note on food dyes at Little League, it now becomes politicized and MAHA-fied in ways that complicate and dilute the power for positive change:“Lengthy conversations about the ills of food dye, how food dyes are banned in other countries but not the US, hints at MAHA glee. I hear, “We don’t have to wait until food dyes are banned to stop eating them.” All of this chatter and no direct statements about political parties. But Trump won 52% of Arizona’s vote and if I had to guess there was a solid group who didn’t love Donald but were happy with a lot of what RFK had to say.”
Pope reminds us that there’s conflict, nuance, and love/hate relationships with snack foods and food dyes and the considerations of what gets put on your plate, or your kids plate.
When food dye makes the conversational rounds, it tends to be driven by sensationalist claims—once by mommy bloggers, now by the U.S. administration. These ignore how much work has been done to unravel the complexities of how ingredients interact with the human body, and how that varies. But how can we know more, when scientific funding and research, healthcare, and education are all being gutted—not only in America, but in Ontario, too (shout-out to Doug Ford).
All of this leads to where we are now, where the 2015 warning calls were trampled out by vibes and hunches. Food is inherently a social process, but so is health! And ignoring those dynamics mean the potential for good gets drowned out by men with brain worms.
Thank you for reading! AnthroDish Essays come out biweekly on Sunday mornings. If you’d like to support my work, paid subscriptions are $30 USD per year (or $5 USD monthly). Paid subscribers receive two additional Sunday newsletters per month: an AnthroDish interview transcript and a round-up of recipes, books, and shows of the month. There also are some additional fun perks coming later this year!
You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, but I can’t promise it’s anything except random thoughts on any of those platforms.