Remember fruit cocktail? Its natural habitat was school lunches and the inside of Jell-O molds. It came in various containers from the lovable fruit cup that your mom might throw in your lunch sack to the five gallon cans the cafeteria workers would struggle with and scoop into little cups.

There was one weird consistancy throughout the containers. No matter the size there was always one single cherry cut in half in the cocktail.

What the hell was going on at the fruit cocktail factory? They must have had what I imagine to be this giant tank of pineapple, peaches, pears, and whatever else that filled the various containers and somehow managed to only get one cherry in each thing.

This raises some questions in my mind.

Are cherries that expensive and rare in the fruit cocktail game?

Was there some insane board meeting where a fruit cocktail robber baron industrialist slammed his fist down on an ancient walnut table, and made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t going to stand for more than one precious cherry ever making it into a cup of his fruit cocktail.

Was this the job of only the elite of the factory workers? Something all the other workers were shooting for? Was there break room gossip? A cherry monitor?

“Did you hear old man Jenkins is going to retire next week?”

“Yeah man, you think you might make Cherry Picker”

“I don’t know, Shultz has had his nose up management’s ass for a while so…”

“No one deserves it more than you Larry…no one”