Dyes for dinner?

Arts & Activities, Dec, 2003 by Jeri Deo

Many fruits, vegetables and flowers make great natural dyes for foods as well as fabrics. With the holidays upon us, let's take a look at the typical American holiday dinner and find as many items as possible to make dyes.

The main course with all the trimmings are set out for all to eat and enjoy. Turkey and dressing are not on our list of dyes, but cranberries make a beautiful pink and red dye. That might be where the red stain on the white tablecloth under Aunt Millie's place came from.

Next, we see green onions as a garnish for the giblet gravy. Green onions produce a nice shade of green, just like the grass stains on the seat of your white shorts.

The skins of the yellow onion will make a yellowish-brown dye, like the color of a piece of manila paper used in art class. Iced tea is a light brown shade and will stain the white cloth covering the table just like the cranberries.

Those walnuts will make a darker shade of brown. We just need the shells and not the insides, though. To use walnut shells, we have to soak them in water for a week or so before the dye is brown enough to color any cloth.

Carrots are not only great to eat, but they make a rich golden-orange color, like the orange part of candy corn.

But we only need the peels. The rest we can eat raw or cooked.

Spinach and all green leafy vegetables makes strong dark-green dyes. Remember the grass stain? If you don't like to eat spinach, you can try wearing it. It might not make your morn too happy, but it will sure make you smile to know you didn't have to swallow your spinach.

The lemon rind on your glass of iced tea makes ... you guessed it ... yellow, and orange rinds make orange and yellow-orange.

My personal favorite part of the meal is next: Dessert anyone? Hot baked apple pie ... I hope that someone saved the peels from the yellow apples, because they make a golden yellow dye, or greenish-yellow if they were green apples.

Sweet blueberries are the blue star of the dyes. But they are more purple-blue than true blue, like on the American flag.

Raspberries are red as well as pink, and any kind of berry you can think of can be used as a dye. When you want to know what color they will be, squish one on a white paper towel (or eat a bunch of them and look at your teeth and tongue) and see what color is left from the juice.

So now you know why your morn makes you use your napkin instead of your shirt sleeve to wipe your mouth at dinner. Chances are, if you can eat it, you can wear it too!

Jeri Deo is a free-lance writer from Corpus Christi, Texas.