Common dietary advice for both eating healthy (healthily) and maintaining your weight, and your waistline, is to fill your plate with color. Half of it should be fruits and vegetables, they say, the richer the colors the better.

I’ve also read that to lose weight, you should not only downsize the food portions, but should also downsize your plate size. The theory being that you trick your brain into thinking you’re eating a lot because your salad plate, serving as your dinner plate, is heaping, seemingly overloaded, with food.

These are good ideas to not only trim your size, but to keep it trimmed. Not to mention improving your overall health.

As a quilter, I love color. And not only do I love splashing color onto my fabric palette, but I also love adding it to my food palette (palate). I marvel at the colors nature has bestowed on us, the translucent slices of red and white radishes, delicate slivers of orange carrots, shiny green leaves of romaine lettuce, light green slices of succulent avocado, luscious rounds of red tomatoes and the deep, rich red of my favorites, strawberries and watermelon.

I could go on, but you get my drift. It seems that nature has provided us with edible colors of many shades and hues, except for one. Blue.

Yes, the word blue is half of the name for blueberries, but they are not truly blue. They are more of a purple violet. The only “blue” food that I’ve eaten (overeaten) is the food that I eat when I feel blue, whatever its actual color might be.

Well, apparently, there is another food association with the color blue. According to a study referred to in the October/November edition of AARP Magazine, if you eat off of a blue plate it will make the food look unappetizing, and ahem, put you off your food.

I’ve had many sets of dishes over the years, in different colors, but never blue. I can’t think of ever seeing blue plates. I’m sure there must be, I just haven’t been looking. Perhaps there was a subconscious reason for that, but now that I’ve read this, I think I shall go shopping for a small blue plate to eat off of during my feeling-blue days.