NEW YORK — You know you’ve said it. We all have. “Mmm, that looks so delicious — I want to try some!” That’s because when it comes to what we eat, it’s not just a matter of taste.

What foods and drinks look like — the colors we see before the first morsels or sips hit our tastebuds — have mattered to people for millennia. And nowhere has that been more blatant than the American food palate, where the visual spectrum we choose from includes not only the primary colors but artificial ones that nature couldn’t even dream up.

For well over a century, food manufacturers in the United States have used synthetic dyes in their products as part of their production and marketing efforts. Often, it’s been in hopes of making a mass-produced food look as fresh and natural as possible, reminiscent of the raw ingredients used in its production.

In other cases, it’s been about making an item look interesting or distinctive from competitors, like candies or desserts in an electric blue or neon pink. Think “blue raspberry Slurpee” or “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

It hasn’t been without controversy. Over the decades, there have been pushback and government regulation over how food and drink have been colored, most recently with the decision last month from the federal Food and Drug Administration to ban red dye No. 3 from foods and oral-ingested drugs because of concerns over a possible cancer risk.

But no one’s calling for food not to be colorful. That’s because there’s no escaping the importance of what we see when it comes to what we eat, says Devina Wadhera, faculty associate at the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts of Arizona State University.

“Your first sensory contact, if your eyes are open, is going to be sight,” she says. “That’s going to be the first judgment we’re going to make.”

The food manufacturers of the late 19th century knew they had to get the visual appeal right. It was part of their marketing, a shorthand to encourage brand recognition, to make consumers feel comfortable about quality and overcome worries — or realities — about spoilage as food production became industrialized, says Ai Hisano, author of “Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat.”

Synthetic dyes helped overcome problems like foods losing color in the production process and helped make foods look more “natural,” she says.

Then, over time, dyes were deployed to make foods look “fun” and appealing to audiences like young children.

That doesn’t mean manufacturers didn’t sometimes use colorants that could even be deadly — hence the reason there’s regulation.

It can even extend past the food itself to the colors involved in its presentation, Wadhera says, pointing to research showing people eating different amounts or preferring certain foods linked to the colors of the dishes used to serve them.

And people aren’t necessarily aware they’re doing it.

“There’s a lot of things with color that you can manipulate and affect judgments,” she says. “You don’t think of it, though. ... We make automatic judgments on the food and we don’t even realize it.”