If you want to make a red, white, and blue dessert for your July 4 celebration, a simple method is to frost a cake with whipped cream. Use blueberries to make a square in the upper left hand corner. Put raspberries in rows to make he stripes and you’ll have an attractive flag-inspired dish to feed to family and friends.

The point I am trying to make is that blueberries are blue and raspberries are red. But I can almost guarantee that without much effort you can find children not far away on this holiday weekend who are running around with blue tongues. Their tongues are blue because they have been eating ice pops or snow cones that are the color of antifreeze or a beverage served in an episode of Star Trek. The flavor is called “blue raspberry.” It doesn’t taste like raspberries. It tastes like sugar. Imagine a jug of corn syrup suffering from vitamin C overdose.

I have no idea why some people think that it is a good flavor. I have no idea why children think that it is an appetizing color.

Not far from our home there is a treat shop. They sell all kinds of candy, popcorn, fudge, chocolates, donuts, cotton candy, snow cones and at least a dozen flavors of hard ice cream. I love to stop for a treat and most of the time I head for the ice cream. Often they will have huckleberry, which is a blue-purple color or blueberry swirl, which is vanilla ice cream with swirls of blueberries. They also frequently sell a flavor called blue raspberry, which is bright blue. It is my observation that 95% of the blue raspberry is sold to children, usually those under 10 years old. Adults prefer more natural flavors and colors.

Not long ago we visited the shop with our 2-year-old grandson. He chose the bright blue ice cream. The portions are very generous at the shop and he ended up with more than he wanted to eat. Sensibly, he stopped eating and left some of the ice cream in his dish. Not so sensibly his grandfather, after finishing his own dish of huckleberry ice cream, finished off the ice cream left in the grandson’s bowl. Yes, it turned his tongue blue. No, it didn’t taste like raspberries. It tasted like . . . Well, it is hard to describe. “Super sweet” comes to mind. It was obvious why the 2-year-old didn’t feel like finishing it.

I grew up with a distrust of artificial flavors and colors. Red dye number 2 was initially deemed to be safe by the federal Food and Drug administration. Then it was discovered that the research concluding that red dye number 2 was safe to consume had been funded by the chemical industry that made the food dye. The color was a dark red and was often used in foods that had an artificial raspberry or sometimes and artificial strawberry flavor. The flavors were not at all like the fruit from which the name came. They were, frankly, chemical. I can remember going out with our family and ordering a raspberry milkshake that came with that dark red color and tasted awful. And I’ve always been a big fan of milkshakes.

Not long afterward the Food Additives Amendment passed that required producers of food to prove that their food additives were safe. Red dye number 2 was suspect and consumers began to avoid foods with the color.

Somewhere, someone decided that artificial raspberry flavor combined with red dye number 2 wasn’t good for sales and blue raspberry was born. At least I think that is how it happened. At least I have never seen a blue raspberry and I don’t think one occurs in nature. No food of which I am aware is naturally the color of those snow cones, popsicles, ice cream and ICEE brand drinks that turn the tongues of children blue. For the record the color is Blue dye, number 1.

These days the bright blue color isn’t only relegated to the frozen food section of the convenience store. Twizzlers has a blue raspberry flavor and you can get Jolly Ranchers with the same color and strange chemical flavor.

It seems possible that one of the reasons food manufacturers have gone blue is that there are a lot of natural flavors that we associate with red. We have bright red cherries on the tree in our yard. This is the season for fresh strawberries, also red. Real raspberries are red. Watermelons are red on the inside. Cranberries are red. Apples are red.

Nature is full of red foods. It is surprisingly lacking in blue foods. Blueberries and huckleberries are blue, but they are a dark blue, not that neon-bright color that comes out of the ICEE machine at the convenience store. There are some raspberries that ripen into a bluish purple color that are called as white bark raspberries.They look nothing like the color of an Otter Pop.

It may be that the most appealing feature of blue raspberry flavor and color in food is that so far it has not been proven to cause cancer in lab rats. At least I don’t think it does.

While I’m on my soapbox about blue raspberry flavored candy and freezer treats, I’ll offer another theory, completely untested and probably wrong. I think that part of the reason for the bright blue color is that a dark blue shade with a bit of purple, like the real color of blueberries, is the color of artificial grape flavor. In my opinion the purple color is very important in getting people to believe that the flavor is grape. In a blind taste test, artificial grape flavor is closer to pineapple or banana than grape.

I hope you have a happy July 4 holiday, filled with fun with family and friends. It’s a good day to remember the best things about our country and our history.

While you’re at it, however, stick to the yellow lemonade. Who decided that pink was a good color for lemonade anyway?