What is it's natural color? I know there is a white cheddar. Is that just undyed cheddar or is it a different variety?

Yeah, they should've used green dye that gives us cancer, that way they at least have their natural colour.

I also thought this was a joke until I read the comments. Pistachios have always been pistachio coloured in the rest of the world.

There's something very American about drowning a perfectly healthy natural product in brightly coloured dye.

many different kinds of bananas and plantains

and even the "original banana-flavour"-banana is still around, the kind is called "grand michel" and can still be bought, but is no longer suitable for mass farming (due to some fungi/bacteria vulnerability)

There are still some dark purple bananas out there. They are usually less than 1/2 the size of a normal (cavendish?) banana. They don't taste as good to me but many people love them.

I also figured this was just a "let's screw with the youth"-type post. We used to eat pistachios all the time when I was a kid (I'm 35) and I don't think I've ever seen a red one before today. They were always beige/greenish.

It's absolutely real; there's a joke about it in The Naked Gun.

It's not that there used to be a red variety of pistashio, they were sold coated in this oily red gunk that would stain your fingers pink. That stopped at some point in the late 90's early 2000s.

There are bananas that are dark red to dark purple, those varieties barely get imported to the US. For some reason the import market is 1-variety-of-bananas-at-a-time-until-it-goes-extinct.

The real answer is that yes, they were red, but no it wasn't because they were poor quality.

It's because the world's largest exporter was Iran, and Iran had a blanket policy of dying their pistachios red.

Ok that makes sense because I (a 30+ yo canadian) was so confused.

They were dyed because they were hand picked and oils from the pickers hand would cause discoloration. The red dye covered that up.

Machine harvested pistachios didn't have that problem.

Warwick Davis (best known for his roles as Wicket the Ewok or Willow) told this story from when he was an extra at the pod race in Star Wars Episode 1.

He had an awesome looking cocktail and he made the fatal mistake of taking three large sips in the first take. And of course he had to repeat that action every take. And they had to do many takes. Trouble was (apart from the enormous amount of liquid) that the cocktail tasted absolutely awful. But as a professional he stuck to his role of course.

Those takes never made it into the movie. They aren't even available as cut scenes or still photos.

Another commenter said it was the oil on people's hands

Blood oxidizes to a dark brown/black pretty quickly so a red dye wouldn't really hide it.