watching the news and not eating your tea
Here's a really interesting post about the impact of food color on flavor. I'd never thought about it quite like this before but it makes sense. Thinking about the example she gives, I'm sure that my assumption, before tasting, would be that a redder cherry sauce would be fresher tasting than one that was brown. Even if the sauces were exactly the same, it's not surprising that you might taste them as different based on the visuals and they way they alter your expectations. This probably relates to studies I've read about that say people tend to reject blue food. That is, blue food that's not supposed to be blue. Dye a bunch of mashed potatoes blue and most people won't want any. And I've had the experience where I've felt that adding food color to something changes the flavor. Which of course it doesn't. If you gave me spoons of the same buttercream dyed blue and yellow to taste while I was blindfolded, there'd certainly be no way to tell them apart. But if I tasted the same thing w/o the blindfold, it wouldn't at all surprise me to find that, say, the yellow frosting tasted more buttery.