Color-Coding Food

Let me explain something about the Irish bread recipe my family has - it is like crack to me. It is extremely good, but the problem is that disappears just as quickly as it arrives. Now, I would never want to have it every day, because then it would lose its special nature, but when it is around you have to take advantage and not waste the opportunity. Last time I came downstairs to discover an Irish bread on the stove, I quickly cut off a couple of slices to put in the microwave because the bread is even better when warm. The key, I have found, is that you never want to microwave any food with the butter already on it, because you never get the amount right. People always put on too much butter and so you end up with the extra running down your hand, which is no good.

Anyways, as I was waiting for my bread to heat up I had taken the edge of the bread for an extra piece (that's right, Fatty McGee over here likes to have a snack while waiting for food). I reached into the refrigerator without looking, grabbed the first stick of butter I saw and put some on my bread. It wasn't until I had taken that first bite that I realised something was way off. A second glance at the stick revealed that it was unsalted butter, intended for baking. Obviously, this just wouldn't do. Frankly, I was lucky to have caught it when I did, because you can easily scrape cold butter off a piece of bread, but that job gets much harder to do if the butter has started to melt. I nearly wasted a couple pieces of perfectly good Irish Bread.

This minor occurrence every-day, as they often do, got me thinking. I think we need to start color-coding food. Sure, we already do this to a small degree with the different kinds of milk (1%, 2%, Skim, Whole) which already come with different color tops. This packaging has, on more than one occasion, stopped me from accidentally grabbing the wrong milk in the store. However, I think we need to start doing this with all the foods that looks the same but are actually quite different. Make the extra fatty foods blue, and the healthy foods pink or something. Now, I'm just talking the labels, because if you start putting in food coloring then you're likely to start screwing with the way food comes out of the oven. (Though, that's not the worst idea. It could go along way in preventing food allergies. I may have to come back to this in another blog post.) The point is that I need all the help I can get to save me from myself.