If you opened a can of baked beans to discover a brown gloopy sauce containing brown haricot beans, rather than the orange-red sauce and beans you were expecting, what thoughts would run through your head?

Dr Carolyn Cobbold’s research interests are science and food in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has recorded two extracts from her book A Rainbow Palate: How Chemical Dyes Changed the West’s Relationship with Food for Talking of Food