What purpose was food coloring first used for?

To make it look more appetizing I guess.

Without yellow coloring, margarine looks like white lard.

My Wisconsin grandma told me about the days when they couldn’t sell yellow margarine, because the dairy producers had it banned. Instead, margarine always came with yellow dye and you had to knead it together yourself.

Food dyes were mostly reserved for the upper class, and yes, they were to make the food more apetizing.

During the latter years of WWII, I remember that margarine came in a package that contained a capsule of yellow dye. As @jaytkay mentioned, my mother used to squish it about until the marge turned yellow. Talk about unappetizing…

@gailcalled: There was a Supreme Court Case about this. Plumley v Massachusetts. 1894.

@breedmitch: 1894? Before even my time. However, I’ll check that case out tomorrow. (How are things?)

Things are good. Busy.

I’ll save you the research. The dairy lobby (big milk!) was trying to cast aspersions on the developing oleomargarine industry, so they argued that by coloring the (naturally white) oleo butter yellow colored, they were indeed seeking to perpetrate fraud against the public, who would think they are getting butter. Never mind that dairies had been adding yellow coloring for decades.
The supreme court sided with the milk men and upheld state’s previous decisions supporting this. Big oleo countered by selling natural margarine and allowing consumers to add color post sale.
The dairy lobby should have attacked the health attributes of oleo instead. Margarine is bad for you.

@rpm_pseud0name: This paper has some interesting information.

“While Ancient Egyptian writings tell of drug colorants, archaeologists believe food colors likely emerged around 1500 B.C. Saffron is mentioned as a colorant in Homer’s Iliad, and Pliny the Elder remarks that wines were artificially colored in 400 B.C. Until recently, food coloring could only be obtained from what people readily found in nature. For instance, saffron has long been used to give a yellow tint to rice, and squid ink gives pasta a black appearance. Other popular natural colorants have included paprika, turmeric,
beet extract, and petals of various flowers. By medieval times, chefs had discovered a selection of natural dyes for each color. However, most of these
colors were hard to come by and so were reserved only for the upper classes.

This led to the belief in early Renaissance Europe that color in food indicated nutritional value and an inherent medicinal power. Eating deep red colors produced full, rich blood, and golden colorings promoted divine solar healing.”

Source

Coloring food.