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Comment by jp0d | Hacker News Reader

Never really thought of this. I don't know much about colour blindness. We use visual means as much our sense of taste and smell to judge food. Are people with colour blindness more likely to eat food that's gone bad. Are they likely to consume inedible berries/mushrooms etc that the rest of us can recognise due to their colour?

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Colorblindness typically isn't full dichromacy (only two color channels). More commonly, it's just reduced functioning in one channel that reduces the brain's ability to distinguish similar colors. For example, someone who's red-green colorblind can probably sort extremely underripe tomatoes from the ripe ones, but might mix up almost and fully ripe ones. It's rare in my experience that subtle colorations make a significant difference there, given the range of normal colors in food.

However, colorblindness is strongly correlated with gender and cultural background. I wouldn't be surprised if those were associated with the same behaviors that might lead one to eat unidentified berries and mushrooms.

Yeah, I'm thinking there's some related genetics here rather than the color of food being more likely to turn someone off with regular vision. I think both things can be true though. I'm red-green colorblind, and you're exactly right, it's not that I can't see red or green, they are just a bit harder for me to discern. I know grass is green and blood is red. I know a cardinal is red and a tree is green, however, it's harder for me to find the cardinal in the tree, which is how we learned I was colorblind as a kid. I doubt food looks different enough to me that it would turn normal sighted people off but I'd be ok with it. I'd bet there's some gene related to colorblindness and sense of taste or smell or something.

I struggle with ripeness, I'm deuteroanomalous, and on the green/red dimension I can really stuff it up with some fruits.

Severity of CVD varies by person, so I can't speak to your personal experience. However, I'm better at that same task than my color-normal spouse because I favor other cues that aren't gamed as heavily as colors in modern grocery stores. It's intentional practice for stores to use things like ambiguous lighting and colorful packaging to enhance the "expected" colors of slightly underripe fruit, which in turn has been bred to appear beautifully colored even if not ideally ripe or fresh. These tricks are statistically effective on color-normal people too.

> and cultural background

Do you have any research on this, because I didn't think that culture had any effect on colorblindness. This is news to me.

It's ancestry specifically that has an effect on incidence of colorblindness, and ancestry is necessarily correlated with cultural background. Northern European populations have some of the highest rates in the world at around 7-9% for males, whereas pacific indigenous populations tend to have rates around 2% for the same.

Of course, color perception is heavily influenced by cultural background too and ties into this in complicated ways, but color deficiency tests are deliberately robust to that.

Yep, genetic heritage I absolutely can believe.

I'm red/green blue/purple colorblind (male, common), my mother is red/green colorblind, (female, uncommon) my grandmother has Tetrachromacy (female, very uncommon).

I had thought for a moment, that there may have been some "cultural link" that would allow me to not pass this on to my children.

Smell is probably a larger component of our "did this food go bad?" spidey sense than sight is, but spotting mold has to be tricky unless it's a really high-contrast situation, like dark fuzzies on white cream.

Anecdotally my son is color blind and has on more than one occasion eaten a full loaf of moldy bread without realizing it. He's a bit like me in that he'll go a long time without any desire to eat toast or sandwiches, and then one day you decide you need an entire loaf's worth. He has also never been a picky eater with the one exception of large sliced / chunked tomatoes.

That's what I was wondering about. Sorry to hear about your son eating mouldy bread.

I was once on a camping trip where the lunches consisted of two sandwiches: one slice of white bread, one slice of brown bread, and two slices of green bread. We all returned in good health.

I know that advertising for a restaurant or food deliberately enhances the visual effect of the product

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