I’m 31 and I’ve never in my life seen red pistachios in the UK and I’ve been eating them all my life. What kind of fuck-ass pistachios did you Americans get wtf?
US defaultism
this is a US thing only
I’m 34 and have never heard of these.
IF you’re actually curious, it was because we used to import them, and the importers would dye them red due to discoloration in how they were harvested. Domestic production ramped up in the US and since pistachios didn’t have to travel as far, and because modern harvesting was more mechanized. It was easier to wash, dry, roast and salt them in a shorter time period avoiding the discoloration that required the dye in the first place.
So is a US defaultism kinda thing huh
So if in the 80s I lived in an area that didn’t import them already, say, Fresno, the joke would go over my head? Because I sure as hell don’t remember red pistachios
Similiar reason cheddar is orange. Cheesemakers used to die it to cover inconsistences in quality or rot.
At this point, cheddar is almost perfectly homogenous, but people expect it to be orange, so its orange.
At least they use natural ingredients to make it yellow and not red #5.
What is it’s natural color? I know there is a white cheddar. Is that just undyed cheddar or is it a different variety?
Pale yellow. To make it orange cheddar they just add annatto for coloring.
In the same vein… Maraschino cherries aren’t red, they are golden.
Those are cherries that are not yet Marachino. Light-colored cherries are used because the darker ones don’t bleach enough to look good with the dye they use. Maraschino cherries are whatever color they are dyed with (usually red).
So instead of dying them back to green they chose to make them unholy abominations made with red dye that is known to give cancer? Cool.
Yeah, they should’ve used green dye that gives us cancer, that way they at least have their natural colour.
Wait, this is real? I thought this was a joke…
Like “Back in my day, bananas were bright purple, but that breed died out.”
Nope. It’s real. I was actually thinking about this the other day and just “wondered”. Probably got busy with work and forgot to Google it and then this. I remembered them being red when I was a kid. Now I know why.
I also thought this was a joke until I read the comments. Pistachios have always been pistachio coloured in the rest of the world.
There’s something very American about drowning a perfectly healthy natural product in brightly coloured dye.
Iran died them before export. Not Americans.
Presumably at their request, or at least their approval, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing in any other country. Most products in the US are imported, don’t pass the buck. “Iran forced it on us” goes against absolutely everything else we know about US consumers.
Know your customer
many different kinds of bananas and plantains
and even the “original banana-flavour”-banana is still around, the kind is called “grand michel” and can still be bought, but is no longer suitable for mass farming (due to some fungi/bacteria vulnerability)
I also figured this was just a “let’s screw with the youth”-type post. We used to eat pistachios all the time when I was a kid (I’m 35) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a red one before today. They were always beige/greenish.
We over-60s remember when pistachios were red, airplane security was non-existent and everywhere smelled like cigarettes.
I’m two decades younger and remember all that except red pistachios. And my family used to eat a lot of pistachios.
…i can remember watching the apollo-soyuz flight and i remember old people eating red pistachios; i also remember loose tobacco shops in every shopping mall and used to show up at the airport five minutes before my flight and waltz onto the plane without issue…
Hey, I’m not even 40 and I remember getting to check out the cockpit of a plane multiple times. And the brown glass ashtrays at McDonalds.
I’m also 35, and I remember the red ones. But my mom ate a lot of pistachios and sunflower seeds when she quit smoking in the mid 90s
Now smoking is much more financially responsible than eating pistachios
Where? In EU and Australia at least tobacco is taxed to high heaven and costs like 10+ western money units (take whichever, dollar or euro, still roughly applies) a pack/pouch
I pay 14.30€ for a 30g pouch of rolling tobacco. And it’s probably more expensive the next time I buy because the pack before that was 13.50€. There’s a few price-hikes every year.
Yeah, I’m 38 and remember red pistachios. Also remember finding some sort of worm thing burrowed into one of those red pistachios, while I was sitting at my grandfather’s kitchen table eating pistachios. Didn’t stop me. Well, it stopped me from eating that one. But I’m always leery if a pistachio has a hole in it.
Don’t sleep on the extra protein, bro!
It’s chew into your brain and make you Secretary of Health, bro!
It’s absolutely real; there’s a joke about it in The Naked Gun.
It’s not that there used to be a red variety of pistashio, they were sold coated in this oily red gunk that would stain your fingers pink. That stopped at some point in the late 90’s early 2000s.
There are still some dark purple bananas out there. They are usually less than 1/2 the size of a normal (cavendish?) banana. They don’t taste as good to me but many people love them.
There are bananas that are dark red to dark purple, those varieties barely get imported to the US. For some reason the import market is 1-variety-of-bananas-at-a-time-until-it-goes-extinct.
Because most banana varieties aren’t very transport stable.
The real answer is that yes, they were red, but no it wasn’t because they were poor quality.
It’s because the world’s largest exporter was Iran, and Iran had a blanket policy of dying their pistachios red.
I see, so that’s why they have never been red outside the US
Yes it has and currently is
https://www.bulkbarn.ca/en/Products/All/Mediterranean-Red-Pistachios-Dry-Roasted-and-Salt
Youre all just looking to hate on someone
I don’t think that someone not having seen a thing means that they hate it.
Ok that makes sense because I (a 30+ yo canadian) was so confused.
Youre not paying attention like most in here. Or are just looking for another reason to hate on “the others”
https://www.bulkbarn.ca/en/Products/All/Mediterranean-Red-Pistachios-Dry-Roasted-and-Salt
Red pistacios still available in canada right now
I don’t think that someone not having seen a thing means that they hate it.
It’s also about ten years out of date, 25 year olds today probably wouldn’t recognize this
I’m 47 and have never seen this. I only remember pistachios in ice cream but they werent fucking red.
Takes me back. The Naked Gun | Red pistachios scene
I know it’s common for actors to not really eat when filming a scene in which the character is eating but it almost adds to the joke that we never really see them eating the pistachios. They’re just fidgeting with the bags and chewing on nothing.
Warwick Davis (best known for his roles as Wicket the Ewok or Willow) told this story from when he was an extra at the pod race in Star Wars Episode 1.
He had an awesome looking cocktail and he made the fatal mistake of taking three large sips in the first take. And of course he had to repeat that action every take. And they had to do many takes. Trouble was (apart from the enormous amount of liquid) that the cocktail tasted absolutely awful. But as a professional he stuck to his role of course.
Those takes never made it into the movie. They aren’t even available as cut scenes or still photos.
Care to tke dinghy, Frank? No, I took care of that at the press conference.
Was this a regional thing? In my memory, they were all dyed green.
Pistachios are native to Iran, and until the 1970s Iran was the world’s largest exporter. They dyed their exports with a food safe red.
They were dyed because they were hand picked and oils from the pickers hand would cause discoloration. The red dye covered that up.
Machine harvested pistachios didn’t have that problem.
The shell of the pistachio is naturally a beige color, but it may be dyed red or green in commercial pistachios. Originally, dye was applied to hide stains on the shells caused when the nuts were picked by hand.[51] In the 21st century, most pistachios are harvested by machine and the shells remain unstained.[51] Wikipedia
I found this great place that dyes it with garlic
Well now I’m wondering what those stains were. Did they dye them red because the people picking them had their hands bleeding? We were all just ingesting small amounts of laborer’s blood?
Yes, but as technique improved, there was less blood introduced on average and the pistachios would not be evenly coloured. To preserve the impression of quality, the farms then adopted the policy of wringing the worst performing worker of each batch of their blood to cover the batch in red homogeneously. This motivated improved performance batch on batch (less blood) and eventually, two workers had to be wrung, and at some point the remaining workers got so good that no blood was introduced and a drastic policy change had to take place.
That or automation.
Another commenter said it was the oil on people’s hands
Blood oxidizes to a dark brown/black pretty quickly so a red dye wouldn’t really hide it.
We used to get the red ones around Christmas. I just thought they were decorative for the holidays, like Hersey’s kisses changed to Christmas color wrapping
Was pistachio ice cream also red?
No, pistachio flavored ice cream and puddings and such have always been green.
Good question, no and it confused me as a child in the 60s
Fun fact, the ketchup chips in Canada were inspired by these
/s
Where did you get that from?
I should have included the tag, I made it up 😄
His ass
don’t default to “he”, say “they”
Lmfao
They tasted better this way. I wish they could bring this pistachio back from extinction.
The Red Pistachio mold plague spread with surprising speed. Horticulturalists were caught flatfooted, but pulled a rabbit out of their hat with the current strain of green pistachios, saving the sector. It was quite a wild ride.
I guess you had to be there.
Pistachio Green!
Say what you will about becoming Pistachio Green, but it’s one of the few jobs that didn’t require you to use AI.
They still exist. They’re just from Iran.
You could always add red food coloring if you have some old bottles from before they took out the toxic
