Eating in Color

Orange marmalade. Black licorice Scotty dogs. Red wine. I’ve been making mental lists of what I can taste – and what I like to taste – and these three keep coming up. I like to think I’m eating in color.

Orange is bitter and sour and sweet all at once. It’s the color that accents my kitchen (and much of the rest of my life). It covers my bedroom walls. It’s the color of my favorite mugs for tea. It houses my phone and notebook. Some mornings I carry my orange mug, my orange phone, and my orange ipad into the living room to start my day and feel both mortified at my apparent predictability and happy with this bounty of color all at once. But there was a time when I shunned orange. I wouldn’t wear it because I didn’t want to call any more attention to my hair than it already did on its own. And when I was in college I spent a weekend at an aunt’s house while she was having a breakdown; she had a downstairs hall or room that was bright orange, and I began to associate the color with this frightening and formidable white-haired woman who chastised my mother on the phone about her poorly raised children, making her cry 3,000 miles away from us. None of this was anyone’s fault – not mine or my brother’s or my mother’s or my aunt’s – but for years I worried that liking orange too much was a sign of some slight instability. My orange walls have been different tones, of course – yellow balances out the red, softening the shade I see. My oranges are the ones children use to color in the sun or the exact duplicate of a naval orange. And when I taste the marmalade my friend Irene gave me this last New Year’s, I taste not just the fruit but the very color of orange.

In another register entirely, I’m also drinking in color. My younger brother has changed his eating habits. When he visited me this winter, he had me get out my vegetable juicer to share his new tricks. He brought a box full of fresh beets, spinach, carrots, apples, cucumbers, and ginger. We experimented with combinations, which for me was an experiment in both taste and color. Though I loved the freshness of the light green pure cucumber and the sweetness of carrot, what I ultimately like best is a totally mixed concoction. Though I revel in drinking such virtue, the pleasure for me is in the process: washing and slicing the vegetables, then feeding them through to see what colors they make when liquefied. I might start with spinach for a deep dark almost moldy green, then add carrots for a layer of orange, which softens the green at first and then, with more layers, simply alters the orange. The beets turn everything deep dark pink, of course. And then the apples soften the shade again. When I drink it I swear I am tasting, in turn, green and pink and orange. I close my eyes and try to imagine the fruits and vegetables individually – carrots, spinach, beets, apples – but all I taste is delicious color.