What color is your salmon, flamingo, leaf, soil, golden retriever, yolk, beer, diesel fuel? Measuring color in the field

In a curious sort of information design, salmon farmers apparently choose the desired orangness-pinkness of their product from a color chart (SalmoFan) provided by Hoffmann-LaRoche which supplies the food dyes to color farmed salmon that would otherwise be gray, khaki, pale yellow, or pale pink. The SalmoFan is in tomorrow’s New York Times, “Farmed Salmon Looking Less Rosy.”

[Update: the article is also available here.]

Note the cute fins on each SalmoFan color chip.

This story in the Times takes on immediate personal interest because tonight we made fresh salmon homebrew sushi for dinner. A leftover piece, held up to the screen, falls about 6 color chips in from the right on the SalmoFan color wheel (assuming accurate monitor color, currently calibrated in the faint WYSIWYG hope of corresponding to CMYK printing on paper).

Or maybe it was wild salmon tonight. Which poses its own environmental concerns.