In the beginning or the 1900s the great lords of enterprise created synthetic raspberry red. Amaranth they called it: after the blossom and from the Greek, “a flower which does not fade.” It was a key, one step closer to one of God’s elusive majesties: reproducing the taste of a natural raspberry. So hard to do. We taste not just through tongue, but with smell and sight. And raspberry? Oh, the strange and subtle scents of that fruit. It’s like a mix of violet and jasmine, with hints of vanilla...and is that celery? Or alchemy? What chemical masala could mimic God’s grand bouquet? The secret ingredient in synthetic raspberry was always the human mind. What chemists couldn’t copy, they evoked: brought together just enough different hints of scent and hue to trick the brain into remembering what it once knew. Memory the magic in a mass-produced taste, passing undetected in its glorious banality. In the 1970s, Soviet scientists suggested amaranth dye could cause cancer in mice. Its allure, dubbed unfading, fell. And so it was, (à la Kipling just so) that blue raspberry was born. That uncanny child of an industrial age, imitation pressed one step too far from its source— until the whole house of cards collapsed, covering the passage to memory’s wells. Without the final reminder of that raspberry red, the whole taste lost its tartness. Like salt without savor. (Is this what Isaiah meant when he spoke of a world where we changed the ordinance, transgressed the laws, broke the link from earth to heaven?)
Originally published in A Book of Lamentations