@maxxrosenblum
Instagram · Greenscreen Talking Head
@maxxrosenblum Blue is the world’s favorite color and America’s most-eaten dye, poured into sports drinks, candy and slushies by the ton. It is also the one color nature almost never makes: fewer than one in ten flowering plants is blue, and almost no animal produces a true blue pigment, so the blues you admire in a jay or a butterfly are tricks of light, not ink. That never mattered while the color came from petroleum. Then regulators ordered food companies to go natural by 2026, and set a deadline biology cannot meet. Mars, reformulating M&M’s from natural sources, rebuilt four of its six colors and lost on two. One of them was blue. The only real source of natural blue is spirulina, a pond algae farmed at rounding-error scale, about half of it in a single country. New blue drinks alone will need several times the world’s entire supply of natural pigment, before a single candy is colored, and it takes roughly seven times as much of the natural stuff to match a synthetic shade that is still 60 to 70 percent cheaper. Call it the Nature Tax: the bill that comes due when a government orders an industry to make something natural that nature cannot supply, paid in higher prices, duller blues and shelves that slowly empty. And blue is only the first domino, because every “natural” promise on every label is the same bet, a synthetic you can make on demand swapped for a living thing you have to grow, on a schedule nature never agreed to. #economics #blue #bluefood #health
