While I was shopping....

Generally speaking, I do my daily food shopping on semi auto pilot. Yes, I said daily. I shop every day. I experimented once about five years ago with doing a weekly shop, but I wound up with a fridge full of rotting food. I just can't anticipate what I'll feel like cooking four days from now.....

Anyway, a few days ago my daughter and I were taking an unusually long, leisurely stroll through the aisles, basically because we were bored and had nothing else to do. At the end of one of the aisles the store had a small display aimed at inspiring shoppers to do a little holiday baking. There were the usual suspects: cookie mixes, peppermint chips, almond paste, mulling spices.... nothing to raise an eyebrow at really, until we saw these two jars.

You know how you can walk down the same aisles for years and just zero in on your necessities? Every once in a while those dusty jars on the top shelf catch your eye, but nothing registers - at least not for me. I have no primal instinct to inspect anything above eye level; especially anything jellied or floating in some sort of murky liquid. So when these top shelf relics were suddenly thrust into the limelight, we had to take a gander.

OK, I suppose I kind of 'get' the chocolate flavored ones. Chocolate covered cherries are a holiday favorite, so chocolate flavored cherries are along the same lines. Maybe. But the wild berry flavored cherries? I admit, they were a very pretty shade of blue, almost an indigo really. The amount of FD&C Blue #1 used to make them that color probably makes them visible from space, and I'll bet they glow under a black light.

My real question is: why re-flavor cherries? I know that I could find at least a hundred items in that same supermarket that are cherry flavored. It is obviously a very popular flavor. So why, when you actually have a real (albeit preserved in syrup) cherry, would you feel the need to change it? Besides all of the cherry flavored candy, there are literally shelves full of medicines that boast of being cherry flavored; especially for children - it seems to be THE flavor of choice for the 'under 10' set. We also have cherry cola, cherry yogurt, cherry oatmeal, cherry applesauce, cherry frosting, cherry brandy, cherry Jell-o, cherry water, cherry tea, cherry wine and cherry lip gloss. There are even cherry flavored dried plums. Why re-flavor plums? But I digress......

I think it is a question that I will never find the answer to. Especially since I don't ever see myself happening upon a new recipe calling for electric blue cherries that will have me scrambling for my measuring cups and sugar. I'm just not that brave, or creative, or careless with my intake of copious amounts of artificial colorings. I'll just stick with the boring, old, cherry flavored cherries. The red ones.

(Kudos to my daughter, Paige, for the fabulous photo!)