To be quite honest, we have no idea whether or not Allura Red AC (aka Red 40) causes kids to become decidedly non-mellow. But we do know that the food dye’s advocates would be well-advised to spiff up their flagship website, which thousands of concerned folks certainly visit every day via The Google. For starters, the graphics don’t exactly impress. Nor does the matter-of-fact slogan: “Red Dye 40—It’s in Your Food.”
But the what really strikes us as off-kilter is the site’s “Editorial,” which makes the mistake of mentioning a certain unpalatable (albeit fictional) substance in its lede:
If you’re not familiar with the movie “Soylent Green” it’s about a future where the planet is overcrowded, resources are very thin and society is tightly controlled. Their food is even more highly processed than our food is today, partly in an attempt to extract every possible calorie to feed the masses. At the climax of the movie, the hero (Charlton Heston) discovers that the staple referred to as “Soylent Green” is made from reprocessed human bodies. He runs through the streets in horror shouting “Soylent Green is People!”
In our case, Soylent Red is Bugs.
Since Microkhan’s got a strong science-nerd streak, that factoid actually makes us more likely to pop a can of Strawberry Crush in the near future. But we’d imagine most Americans don’t share our particular strain of geeky madness.
selenized // Aug 21, 2009 at 11:20 am
the slogan cycles through a bunch of off-kilter things that red dye 40 is in, when I hit the site it was telling me “Red Dye 40 – it’s in your children” which was a little disconcerting.