If I ask you to come up with a Blue food item, the only thing that you will probably come up with is 'Blueberries'. But apart from that where is blue food?
we have lovely red tomatoes, green broccoli, yellow pumpkins and orange oranges but nothing for blue! Blue cheese is not even really blue.... so dont give me that one. Oh, and any one eating those GM peppers, that by now probably come in vibgyor is automatically disqualified to answer my question.
So, is there something here for the biologists, enviormentalists and theologists (I will get to this one in a minute), people who earn their bread answering such questions? Did nature on some grand secret purpose clearly leave out blue colour from our food? Probably not. Just as there is an evil hand of mankind in all things gone wrong on our planet, maybe this one too has secrets buried in history.
People who eat a lot of pigments from any food source tend to show a tinge of that pigment in their skin... like if you get a lot of beta carotene from your diet (generally due to some soil condition in which your carrots grow) you would begin to look a bit orangish. No really, I am not making this up. Its called 'carotenodermia'.
Indian mythology has pictures depicting gods in shades of blue, sort of a pictoral representation for thier royal blood perhaps. But I am thinking, maybe that was like this 'carotenodermia' disease of today; a pigment disease of those days. So people who ate blue food were worshiped. Maybe due to some geographical or climatic advantage. On realising the potentials of being gods; and to keep their 'blue pigmented skin' as a secret they went out and ate all the blue food to extinction. Blue berries didnt grow in the tropical Indian subcontinent so it probably survived. Since everything else in those days grew only in the non icicled places, there is now nothing to show for blue coloured food to our generations.
So lets just not blame this generation X or Y or Z? (I am sure they are havoc creating teenagers by now, aren't they?) for screwing with this planet. Generation 'A' was the one who started it all. It probably is in our genes.
P.S. - 28th May2006 - I found this link, which happens to be on Douglas Adam's pet project web site H2G2. First, I think it is interesting to have some real science to the gibberish I have been writing. Secondly, they have not managed to list 'REAL' blue food, even though they have come up with an interesting list. Oh and I had almost forgotton about Bridget Jones! ( Cheers, Mu Beta).
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