Colourful cuisine

A colleague of mine recently went to the restaurant Dans le Noir, where blind staff serve you in the dark. She reported that it was disappointing to discover that her other senses were not stimulated by the deprivation of sight, and that she would not care to repeat the experiment.
‘Experiment’ is my word, and expresses the only way I think one could approach such an experience. Such temporary sensory deprivation is unlikely to give enough time for other senses to compensate, so the point of eating in the dark must be largely to bring home to one how important sight is to the enjoyment of food for most people. When I was little, we used to play around with such ideas by doing things like being blindfolded and being fed randomly cubes of onion and of apple, or eating assorted sandwiches with our eyes closed.
Certainly there are all sorts of visual cues that we pick up and interpret, without having to think in such sophisticated terms as aesthetic impact. Food needs to be the right colour for us to be comfortable eating it; apparently we are conditioned to be suspicious of blue food, but food that is inappropriately green, or darker than it should be, or even just brightly coloured and unfamiliar, will also set off alarm bells.
Whatever the evolutionary reason for the attention we pay to the appearance of food, it can now be used to enhance our enjoyment. One of my personal indulgences is the occasional purchase of black truffle potatoes, which are unprepossessing in their natural state, looking like dirty dark purple Jerusalem artichokes, dull and knobbly. When boiled, peeled and mashed, they turn into a wonderfully episcopal purple mass, with a dry, floury texture and an earthy, almost fruity flavour. With a garnish of spring onion tops for contrast, they make a beautiful third of a meal that also involves the jewelled red of pomegranate seeds on top of the fried duck-breast with a pomegranate sauce and the startling yellow of braised ceps.
Although the flavours were delicious, a great deal of my pleasure in this meal came from the simple joy of the bright colours together - I would love to go to Dans le Noir, but only as an experiment.