Cooking when Colour Blind | Aphrodite Livanes Optometrists

With more Australians switching to home cooking due to the rise in the cost of living, colour blind home chefs don’t have to feel left out.

Thanks to advances in optometry – colour vision glasses in particular – they too can enjoy the full sensory satisfaction of getting creative in the kitchen!

Colour is an integral part of life that most of us take for granted, unless you belong to a relatively small section of the population living with Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD).

20/20 Vision and Colour Blindness

You can have 20/20 vision and still be colour blind – “colour blindness” is a misnomer since it doesn’t mean poor vision.

Rather, it is an anomaly in the way that the eyes perceive colour. Red-green colour blindness – where the individual finds it hard to differentiate between shades of red and green – is the most common. However there are other variations, including blue-yellow colour blindness, and achromatopsia or total colour blindness, where the world appears much like the pictures on a black and white TV.

Colour and Cooking

As any keen home cook will know, meal preparation involves texture, smell, taste, hearing and of course, sight. Adding various ingredients and seasonings at different stages of cooking is often heavily dependent on visual cues, making it difficult for the colour blind.

A typical and very Australian example is barbecuing meat at a picnic – without colour vision, how can you determine the readiness of a medium-rare steak? A colour blind person could rely on a food thermometer, but who remembers to carry one around?!

It can even be a matter of health and safety, as people with Colour Vision Deficiency may not realise that they are serving:

Green potatoes, which are known to be toxic; and
Undercooked chicken, which can lead to food poisoning.

Colour Blind Glasses – Good News for Foodies!

Fortunately for foodies, special filtered lenses are now available which assist the colour blind in distinguishing colours.

At Aphrodite Livanes Optometrists we stock iRo colour blind glasses, which have been developed right here in Australia!

Find out more about the possibilities of colour blind glasses, by booking an appointment at Aphrodite Livanes Optometrists, Brisbane’s only Colour Blind Sight Centre TM. Call today on (07) 3824 1878.