Can you taste the colour?

This morning we did an experiment to see if different coloured food tastes different. We talked about what colour different foods are and if we thought things tasted different if they were different colours. Grace said "if there was a red hot dog it wouldn't taste the same as a brown hot dog" and Olivia said "if a blueberry was black it wouldn't taste the same." We thought about how we could test this out and decided we would need to taste food of different colours to see if they tasted the same or different. We also talked about how we could record our results during our experiment.

First, we had three different jellies. Trystan said he thought the first one would be lime "because it's green" but when we took it out of the mould it was orange - it was just the green mould making it look green! There was also a red jelly and a pink jelly. We talked about it and decided that the jellies would all taste different, and we recorded this prediction on our sheet.

Then we tasted the jellies. We had to try all three flavours so we could decide if they tasted the same or different. We all agreed that they tasted different - one tasted of orange, one of blackcurrant and one of strawberry. We recorded this on our sheet.

After that we had some starburst. We thought these would all taste different too - and they did! We had to make sure we tried two of a different colour so we could work out whether they tasted the same or different.

Next we had some smarties. These were also different colours. Some of us thought they might taste the same, but most of us thought they would also taste different because of the different colours. We had to eat two smarties of different colours to test our theory! Some of us were surprised to find they tasted the same. Harry thought it was because "inside they're all chocolate."

Finally we looked at the results we had recorded and talked about what we had found out. Had we learnt that different coloured food always tastes different, sometimes tastes different, or never tastes different? We agreed that different coloured food sometimes tastes different - the jellies and starburst tasted different, but even though the smarties were different colours, they all tasted the same.

During snack time we also tried two different types of pudding - one was yellow and one was brown. What flavours do you think they might have been? The brown one was the most popular!