Cooking With Colour Blindness

You may not have noticed, but when you cook or eat food, it relies a lot on colour. Don’t believe me? Well, you’ve come to the right place as I am going to tell you, in this wonderful blog of mine, what it is like to cook with colour blindness. Hopefully this gives you non-colour blind people out there some idea of what it's like to deal with colour blindness in your everyday life.

Let me start by saying that I am no Michelin star chef. I don’t cook regularly or well for that matter, but I sort of know my way around a kitchen. So, with that being said, let's get into it.

BBQs

As a South African, I can tell you that our favorite national pastime (aside from winning Rugby World Cups) is to braai. If you don’t know what a braai is, it's basically a BBQ or a grill, but better - because it's South African. Having a braai is a fairly primitive activity: just meat and fire. Now, with that being said, I have been excluded from many family braais, as I am colour blind. The reason for this is, because I can’t tell when the meat is raw or cooked, as the colours look relatively the same to me.

Yes, I have served everything from horribly underdone meat, to so burnt it looks like a lump of coal. Now for anyone who is colour blind and reading this, fear not! There is a simple solution: use a thermometer. If you constantly use a thermometer to check the temperature of your meat, you should be fine. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But why doesn't he use a thermometer”. Well let's just say you will be a massive buzzkill if you tell everyone to stop so you can pop in to grab your thermometer.

Fruit and vegetables

I am not going to pretend that I eat a whole lot of fruit or vegetables, but one common complaint from colour blind people is the taste of different fruits or vegetables. Colour blindness does not affect your taste buds, but you might just be eating unripe fruit. Disgusting, I know, but if you talk to a few colour blind people, they will tell you how they have had to get used to the taste of unripe bananas.

Unfortunately there is no simple way to fix this dilemma. I would suggest using colour corrective glasses, if you have any, or maybe asking someone else who isn’t colour blind to check for you. However, if you have friends like mine, they will probably tell you to go eat that unripe potato over there. I would say maybe source your fruit and vegetables from a Tesco or something like that.

Peanut Butter

I know this is a strange entry, but hear me out. I have noticed, while doing research on colour blindness, that many colour blind people are shocked to hear that peanut butter isn’t green. I must admit that I had a similar reaction of shock and surprise when I heard the news. I don’t know why this is such a common phenomenon among the colour blind, but people with normal vision find it strange that we think peanut butter is green.

One of the prevailing theories (made up by me) is that certain colour blind monkeys can see texture better, which helps them tell different things apart. I don’t know if colour blind people can see texture better than the average person, but maybe colour blind people see peanut butter as a ‘green texture’ and therefore think it's green. Another less crazy theory is that peanut trees do photosynthesis, so people think that it would make the peanuts in the peanut butter green. Just another one of life’s mysteries I suppose.

Anyway, that's the end of this short, little blog. I hope you enjoyed reading this and I hope you learned a little bit more about what it's like to be colour blind. I aim to be as informative and humorous about this as I possibly can. If you guys could share this blog, even by word of mouth, that would be great. I also have a Facebook page you can check out and I will be expanding to other social media soon. Also feel free to contact me below with any questions or feedback. Thanks.