Green eggs and ham is unappealing, and not just to vegetarians. But why?

According to Charles Spence, experimental psychologist at Oxford University, it’s because we taste things first with our eyes.

In a recent NPR article, Spence explains that this is an evolutionary adaptation; we recognize foods by sight in order to avoid eating something sour or poisonous. This is similar to the honeybees’ black-and-yellow stripes — color acts as an agent of warning in nature, and in the bee’s case, it warns predators against a sting.

After all, most of the time you can’t taste items before you buy them in the supermarket. The solution for food companies is to add artificial dyes to your food, as an attempt to appeal to the sense of sight instead.

Think of a roast chicken, fresh from the oven. Now turn it royal blue, and the odds are that your appetite will turn right along with it. This is exactly what California photographer Laurie Brown does, as she portrays the unappetizing nature of oddly colored food. (click here to view photos.)

It’s common to take these unnatural colors for granted, and in many cases, it increases the appeal to your tastebuds. When you think of mint chocolate chip ice cream for instance, you probably think of it as being a bright green color. Cream, obviously, isn’t green — and neither is the mint extract that’s used to flavor the confection. But mint in its natural state always is, and it’s this idea that might give consumers less pause when purchasing unnaturally colored food.

Retail food businesses prey on this idea as well. For example, consider the odd sexualization of Burger King commercials for Whopper, or how desserts are typically presented in white-napkin restaurants. And if it’s not the food, it could be the uncleanliness of a restaurant’s exterior or the appearance of its employees that lead to negative Yelp reviews.

We might taste with our tongues, but the fact remains that sight will always have the ability to drive our diet decisions, for better or worse.

(above photo courtesy of NPR.)