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.
Transcript of “Winn-Dixie’s Mid-Filet Parsley Runners”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
You know how if you’re in a supermarket and you’re looking in the meat case, you’ll often see what looks like fake grass or green fringe tucked between the steaks and the chops?
Yes, and I always think to myself, you’re not fooling anyone. That’s not real.
But yeah, it’s got a zigzag pattern on it, right? And vertical lines in parallel.
Yeah, yeah, or a grid, sort of.
A grid.
Yeah, and it sort of looks like, you know, fringy or, you know, like bank grass.
Like thinking shears have been taken to some green plastic.
Perfect, yes, yes.
Well, there is a name for those green strips, and they’re not just there for decoration.
The story goes that in the 1950s, a grocery store chain had a problem, and under their bright lights, those cuts of meat looked washed out and pale.
So the company brought in a color consultant who suggested that they paint the back of their meat case green.
And that’s because green and red are complementary colors.
So when they’re next to each other, the color of the meat pops visually and looks fresher.
And sure enough, it worked.
And actually, for the same reason, butchers have been garnishing with parsley for years.
And in supermarkets today, the parsley has been replaced by these artificial parsley runners.
That’s what they’re called.
Parsley runners.
That sounds like somebody’s like stage name or like drag name, parsley runner.
Right.
Or their club that goes jogging on Saturdays.
Yeah, exactly.
And I learned about the work of that color consultant from a new book about the history of how dictionaries have come to define colors.
The book is called True Color and is by a dictionary editor whom we both know, Kory Stamper.
Yeah, Kory’s been a lexicographer that is a maker of dictionaries for decades, and she comes to the subject with a lot of wit and charm.
But she also gets down deep into the details of just how these magical books called dictionaries are put together.
Yeah, and I want to talk about that later on in the show.
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