The telltale red stain of green?

There’s an old saying that you are what you eat. How true that is, I don’t know. But earlier tonight, I enjoyed a salad tossed with lovely wooden salad tossing forks, and while this wouldn’t have been a big deal by itself, something odd happened. I put the salad bowl and the salad tossers into the sink with just a little water, and when I went back to wash them, the water had turned red:

Clearly, the water absorbed whatever stain or dye had been used on whatever wood the tossing forks were made of. Is the wood legal? Damned if I know. But what if the bastards who rule us are somehow forcing the bastards who make money selling to us to stain wood so that it looks like a product that is now banned? I don’t want stained schlocky wood which looks like tropical hardwood but isn’t and therefore leaks into food, OK? I want the old, normal kind of tropical  wood. I want wood that looks like what it is, not wood that is something else but stained to look like what it isn’t.

Sometimes it seems the whole world is going to hell.

While I can’t prove it, I suspect the red staining problem lies with environmentalists who elevate trees over people.

If I’m just being paranoid, someone please let me know. This has never happened before.


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5 responses to “The telltale red stain of green?”

  1. […] Classical Values » The telltale red stain of green? There’s an old saying that you are what you eat. How true that is, I don’t know. But earlier tonight, I enjoyed a salad tossed with lovely wooden salad tossing forks, and while this wouldn’t have been a big deal by itself, something odd happened. I put the salad bowl and the salad tossers into the sink with just a little water, and when I went back to wash them, the water had turned red: […]

  2. Choey Avatar
    Choey

    Wooden implements that are used with food are typically dyed with food coloring which is water soluble. Therefore the red water…

  3. Eric Avatar

    Yeah, well it got all over my hands, just from picking them up. I have never seen anything quite like this.

  4. Amiable Dorsai Avatar
    Amiable Dorsai

    Rinse them until the water runs clear. Maybe the dye is harmless, maybe it’s not. Given the crud that’s come out of China lately, I wouldn’t take the chance.

  5. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    Eric, I have a little background with this. It is probably an aniline dye. From the Wiki article:

    Aniline is toxic by inhalation of the vapour.[9] The IARC lists it in Group 3 (not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans) due to the limited and contradictory data available. The early manufacture of aniline resulted in increased incidents of bladder cancer, but these effects are now attributed to naphthylamines, not anilines.

    I don’t know enough about the origin of various food color dyes, but yours looks like what I remember as Red Number 5. Some of these are coal tar derived and have been banned in this country. In China anything goes of course.