Business historian Ai Hisano has written a well-researched and thought-provoking book that explains how large corporations, agricultural producers, government agencies, and consumers “combined to create a natural color for food that was, in fact, a hybrid of nature and technology, constructing naturalness through commercial and scientific intervention” (p. 6). As Hisano reveals, by the end of the 1970s the United States was the largest market for food coloring dyes in the world, with Americans downing thousands of tons of these chemicals annually. Hisano explains why this came to be and, more broadly, why the color of food became such an obsession for the people who make and market what we eat.

In the first part of the book, Hisano examines how certain colors became standardized in the American food system. Focusing mainly on meats, vegetables, citrus fruits, various confectionary goods, margarine, and butter, she shows how farmers, manufacturers, consumers, retailers, and federal regulators came to see the color content of food as an increasingly important attribute that could indicate quality and healthfulness to consumers. She centers this story on the period between the 1870s and the 1930s, a time when Americans were becoming increasingly separated from the food producers that fed them. Hisano explains that this was the era when new technologies, such as tintometers and spectrophotometers, helped to seed the rise of new professionals, such as color consultants, who began offering food firms advice on how they could use color to better sell their products.

Hisano singles out important but often overlooked actors that helped determine the color of the food we eat, including the United States Department of Agriculture's Color Laboratory, which the Bureau of Chemistry created in 1916 to approve food coloring dyes. She discusses the rise of the synthetic dye industry in the Gilded Age and early twentieth century and explains how firms such as dye manufacturer H. Kohnstamm & Company grew their businesses as growers, canners, butchers, and retailers sought greener peas, redder meats, and dazzling oranges. And dyes are only part of the story. Hisano also focuses on General Electric's Lighting Research laboratory and investigates how grocers came to use various tinted lights in self-service aisles to sell their goods. She also considers print advertising and marketers’ shift from black-and-white photos and sketches to multihued images as the cost of color printing declined in the 1920s and beyond. The chemical industry also plays an important role in this history, with Hisano detailing how DuPont's see-through cellophane wrapping made it more important for food companies to use coloring additives to keep their goods looking fresh.

Hisano is careful to consider how consumer desires also shaped food coloring. In chapter 4, for example, she considers how food processors and cookbook writers in the first half of the twentieth century tapped into the concerns of white, middle-class women to sell new coloring agents. “Color,” Hisano writes, “became a means for food manufacturers to convince housewives that they could display their personalities and creativity by using mass-produced goods” (p. 90). She also looks at consumers in her penultimate chapter, “Reimagining the Natural,” where she discusses consumer backlash against food dyes and coloring additives in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Here readers learn how consumers, in part informed by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Nader's Raiders’ The Chemical Feast (1970), became concerned about potential adverse health effects associated with coloring agents in foods and lobbied the Food and Drug Administration and food companies to return to “natural” dyes and coloring additives deemed safer for human consumption. But as Hisano carefully points out, these new “natural” dyes were not all that natural, because firms still designed them to alter the way foods looked when they came off farms and because the companies that made the dyes were the same industrial firms that had sold consumers “the most dubious, toxic, and artificially colored factory foods” in the past (p. 215).

This book would pair well with environmental historian Anna Zeide's Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (2019), which came out just before Hisano's book was published. Zeide makes the case that if we really want to understand our food system, we have to focus on businesses like canning firms, even though they are often less visible than the big brands that bring us our food. “Because they [canners] are positioned in the middle, between factories and consumers,” Zeide writes, “they allow us to know more about both.” Hisano would clearly agree. Like Zeide, Hisano focuses on the canning industry, but she also explores other middlemen in our food system—color consultants, dye manufacturers, lighting experts—that have played an outsized role in coloring the fruits, vegetables, meats, and candies we eat.

Visualizing Taste should attract the interest of not only business and environmental historians but also regular consumers, who will probably never look at food the same way again after reading it. I expect this book will become required reading on many syllabi focused on the history of American foodways.