Something Red, Something New

I love pistachios. I don't know anyone who doesn't, although I'll allow that there probably are some (if only because there are bound to be those stricken with an allergy). Mainly though, I think that they are impossible to hate. For that reason, there has been no good reason to meddle with the formula. Sure, you can get shelled pistachios, but I've always felt that the flavor lost something from the absence of effort expended to open them.

That one thing aside, I've not seen pistachios in any different form until now. A care package from my dear mother arrived recently, containing in it pistachios that were dyed red. I momentarily questioned whether there was a naturally red variety, but reasoned that even if there was (and I doubted it since I'd never seen or heard of one), this could not be it as it was obvious how artificial its coloring was. There were areas of the shell that were not red, and the edges of the dye job showed.

As the red coloring gets on your hands and is generally a nuisance, one might well wonder why they would do such a thing. I figured it couldn't have been done for no reason, although no reason I could imagine would serve. A little quick research online uncovered a probable reason. It turns out that when pistachios are hand-picked, they are prone to being stained, and so hand-picked ones are often dyed to hide that. Mostly they are machine-picked, rendering the dye job unnecessary.

These ones must have been hand-picked. It is a bit annoying that the dye rubs off as it does, but on the whole I remain happy with these pistachios. The flavor is good, the proportion of easily opened ones to ones opened only with difficulty is about the same (if a bit worse), and if I get upset with the red on my fingers, that's just a reason to eat them at a judicious pace instead of binging until they're gone in a single sitting.