Start saying your goodbyes, America. Tartrazine-tinted pickles, oranges with a Citrus Red No. 2 spray tan and maraschino cherries glowing with erythrosine – all are on the way out the door, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade against artificial food colorants.

And if you’ve got any tears left to cry, here’s another emotional hit: Target just announced it is pulling cereals containing petroleum-based dyes from its shelves by the end of May. Loving you was red, Froot Loops.

That Taylor Swift song really fits the bill on RFK’s anti-dye crusade. Losing them will be blue like we’ve never known: MAHA-friendly foods will have to swap Blue No. 1 for less-vivid natural replacements such as butterfly pea-flower extract and spirulina. And as for dark gray all alone, that’d be the red velvet cake without any Red No. 40 in it. Dark gray because no dye; all alone because nobody wants it.

So say the makers of Duncan Hines cake mixes, although they hastened to add that they’d be replacing the Red No. 40 with beets. “Something like red velvet cake needs to be red, so we’re not going to sell gray velvet cake,” Conagra chief executive Sean Connolly said in an interview. “We use beets as an alternative…”

But once you’ve stopped smiling at the notion of gray velvet cake, you may find yourself puzzled, as any home baker might be. I, for one, have made plenty of dye-free cakes from scratch, using flour, sugar, eggs, oil and the other usual........

© The Spectator