The Taste of Cherry

I was just sitting here, sipping on a Cherry Coke, when a thought occured to me. No, it wasn't that I gave up on my pledge to stop drinking so much soda. This is the first can of soda I've had today, thank you very much, and it's after 8 pm.

I was thinking about how I don't really like eating actual cherries, but how I love eating stuff with chemical imitation cherry flavor. I mean, I don't hate cherries or anything. On the off chance I'm presented with an ice cream sundae, I would not necessarily remove the cherry from on top.

But I don't really have a passion for sitting down and eating a bowl of cherries. I doubt if, in my lifetime, I have eaten more than 50 individual cherries.

And yet I love Cherry Coke, Ben & Jerry Cherry Garcia ice cream, and I even prefer the cherry-flavored Mike & Ike's to all the other fruit flavors.

So why is it that the imitation cherry flavor is so universal, and yet it doesn't actually taste anything like real cherries? It's like some guy in 1950 or whatever invented "fake cherry flavoring" and it's still the same recipie used in everything today. A "Fake Cherry Standard," if you will. That would be pretty weird, but I can't think of any other explanation how Cherry Coke and Cherry Mike & Ike's manage to taste so much alike without tasting anything like their namesake fruit.