Winn-Dixie’s Mid-Filet Parsley Runners

Those green plastic strips tucked between cuts of meat in supermarket display cases? They’re parsley runners, the result of recommendations from a professional color consultant hired by a grocery chain in the 1950s. Under bright store lights, the meat looked pale and unappetizing, so the consultant proposed a simple solution: Green and red are complementary colors, so placing green beside raw meat makes it look fresher and more vibrant. Butchers already knew this, which is why they’d long used real parsley for garnish. Lexicographer Kory Stamper explains more about the psychology of color and the history of efforts to describe its visual properties accurately in her new book True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color from Azure to Zinc Pink. (Bookshop|Amazon) This is part of a complete episode.