For those of you who really know me, you know that I’ve had a long time love affair (ok, obsession) with human behavior, the brain, influences, patterns, etc. So this will come as no surprise that I HAD to share (and document) what just occurred yesterday.

I am extremely affected by color. I have trouble eating in red rooms, dark colors on walls make me feel lethargic, irritable and uneasy, I tend to like my bedroom walls plain white and with very little, if anything, on them. When I wake up in the morning I like to have the palette before me clean so that my thoughts and dream residual can color my world.

A few years ago, I bought a rather thick and heavy book on the psychology of color. I was curious if my thoughts had any validity. Interesting enough, the book gave a whole explanation of each color and all the ways it influenced our brains. Of course, I devoured the book and when I stumbled upon blue and read its effects, well, you just KNOW I had to conduct my own experiment. Just a brief synopsis of the explanation, blue is one of the most popular colors, and favored among men but it is one of the least appetizing. Blue rarely occurs naturally in food aside from blueberries, egg plant, grapes and some plums. Humans are geared to avoid foods that are poisonous and blue coloring in food is often a sign of spoilage or poison. Some weight loss plans even recommend eating your food off of a blue plate and even going so far as painting your kitchen blue. I’m pretty sure you know what my brain was thinking…

“Let’s do an experiment, I wanna see if this has any truth to it!”

This was in October and I had bunko coming up (a dice game for women who are usually do imbibed with vino and chatting it up to learn how to place Bridge or anything else that requires actually thought while playing) so I planned a “fall hoe-down” kind of theme. The main dish being mini BBQ sandwiches. I cut open Hawaiian rolls and stuffed them with pork bbq and then stacked it in a croque-en-bouche style on two separate plates. One being white and the other… yeap, blue.

I set them both side by side, front and center on the buffet table. Half way through the night, I checked on refilling the dishes and found that the entire content of sandwiches from the white plate were gone, while the blue plate had a few sandwiches skimmed off the top. I quickly took sandwiches from the blue plate and moved them to the white plate but also switch the positions so that the blue plate was “closer” to the front of the line. I checked back about 30 minutes later and again, the white plate had far more taken from it than the blue plate. Ok, I’m at bunko, all excited with my findings and can’t really blurt out what I’ve just proven because I'm not sure how well, "Hey, ya'll were a part of this here experiment,not that I secretly made you eat anything gross but, well, you all did EXACTLY what it said you'd do, Hot Damn!" would really go over.

Fast forward five years.

Rathe and I are at the market picking up a few odds and ends. We run across a dozen frosted Easter cookies, six in yellow frosting, six in blueish purple. We bring them home and a week later I notice all six yellow cookies are gone….and all six blueish purple ones are left. So I ask, “Rathe, what’s wrong with these blue cookies, did the yellow ones taste better?’ and his answer was, “No Mom, they just didn’t look… well, very appetizing”

I am beaming :)

Maybe America doesn’t new healthcare entirely, maybe we just need to paint our kitchens blue. Of course, I’ll probably get sued for putting Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and the rest of them out of business but a gallon of blue paint is far less expensive :)