No, you’re not looking through rose-colored glasses — or maybe you are? Regardless, we’re swimming in a sea of pink. Yes, the color has taken over red carpets and fashion magazines, but it has also infiltrated what we eat and drink.
“Food is fashion, and fashion is food, and that’s why pink food became gradually, then suddenly, a thing,” staff writer Maura Judkis wrote back in 2017, following the ascent of millennial pink to the top of the color charts. And six years later, pink continues to deepen — in both senses of the word — its stake in the culinary realm, helped by the rise of the Barbiecore aesthetic, which embraces the doll’s signature hot pink color (and similar shades, such as fuchsia and magenta) to the max, and the upcoming “Barbie” movie.
Though Barbiecore has been around since at least 2019, there has been a tidal wave of pink since the first images from the movie’s set dropped in April 2022. This includes an uptick in the interest in pink foods, according to Google trends, presumably as fans began to plan their themed menus in anticipation of the premiere. And on TikTok, #pinkfood has 95.6 million views and counting.
Get the recipe: Beet and Goat Cheese Pasta
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But the fascination with pink food is nothing new.
The accidental invention of pink lemonade in 1857 sold twice as quickly as the original recipe, as Allison Robicelli recently wrote. Within the past decade or so, the #RoseAllDay trend swept the wine-consuming public, while items such as pink pineapple, ruby chocolate and pink gin debuted, along with the pink sauce that went viral on TikTok. On top of that, you can find the shade on menus in pink cocktails and tacos, and some restaurants have gone so far as to design their entire aesthetics around the color.
“Finding pink in the kitchen is actually rather difficult,” said Maria Zizka, author of “Cook Color,” which offers a rainbow of recipes made from natural ingredients organized by hue. Sure, you could use food dye — it’s responsible for the color of bubble gum and cotton candy — but the color is much rarer in nature. “Sometimes an ingredient will have a pink part, like the very inner folds of a shallot, or they’ll have what you might call a pink moment when you’re cooking,” such as medium-rare lamb, Zizka said. Or you have to make the most of the pink ingredients that are available, including grapefruit and pomelo flesh, certain varieties of dragon fruit and prickly pear, the interior of watermelon radishes and cooked shrimp.
For the pink section of her book, Zizka leaned on beets, among other ingredients. “You think beets, and your mind goes right away to red usually,” she said. “But what I found when I was developing these recipes was that beets were super useful in achieving a pink color,” such as in her recipes for beet-imbued gravlax and chilled summer borscht.
Private chef Meredith Hayden made a similar discovery with a recipe for Beet and Goat Cheese Pasta. Hayden posted a recipe to her TikTok in April 2022 — that it was posted around the same time as the first “Barbie” movie images was “total coincidence,” she said — showcasing noodles tossed in a vibrant sauce made by blending beets and goat cheese. While the idea for such a dish isn’t novel — I found a recipe for pink spaghetti with beet and ricotta sauce in “Cherry Bombe: The Cookbook” from 2017 — timing is everything.
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Hayden’s recipe and similar iterations have been dubbed “Barbie pasta” online, with the hashtag having amassed 2.9 million views on the platform as of the writing of this article, up 1 million views from a couple of days prior. And though Hayden didn’t make the connection to the iconic doll intentionally, her followers did, with one calling it the “Nicki Minaj pasta.” (The rapper called herself Harajuku Barbie back in the Myspace era, and the association stuck.)
According to Hayden, it’s the dish’s bright colors that caught people’s eyes the most. “It just feels so fun that how can you not smile when you’re looking at a plate of pasta that’s that color?” Zizka added. And given the past few years we’ve lived through, we are feeding off these bright pinks’ playfulness, fun and vibrancy.
Get the recipe: Beet and Goat Cheese Pasta
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“We’re still feeling the effects of being locked up for two years and so restricted for two years, and I have noticed that people are still trying to make up for lost time,” Karen Haller, author of “The Little Book of Colour: How to Use the Psychology of Colour to Transform Your Life,” said. While the softer pinks of a few years ago are soothing, gentle and calming — “If cuddles were a color, it would be pink,” Haller said — more vibrant pinks are more stimulating, and people are embracing these bolder hues in response to a lack of external stimulation during the pandemic. “It’s not shy. It’s not quiet. It’s far more feisty. It’s far more showing independence. And it’s saying I’m not a pushover.” (Sign me up.)
Barbie and hot pink are intertwined, and according to Haller, so is what the movie represents: nostalgia and a sense of escapism. “It’s an escape, like an antidote to everything that’s going on in the world,” she said. And this isn’t the first time pink has played such a role.
Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian fashion designer who was popular in the 1930s and ’40s, made “shocking pink” her signature color. “Using bright colors, especially pink, was a way for Schiaparelli to disconnect from the global conflict at hand and find a source of inspiration,” fashion writer Alyssa Kelly wrote in CR Fashion Book.
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How long will we be Barbie girls living in a Barbie-pink world? No one can say for sure, but Haller thinks we may be overindulging and could come to regret having embraced hot pink everything. “It could happen to be that when this ‘Barbie’ movie is all over next year, I wouldn’t be surprised to read the headlines, ‘What were we thinking?’”
That may be the case, but I’d still happily eat bowls of Beet and Goat Cheese Pasta for years to come, whenever I need a boost of serotonin.
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