Have you ever why some candy that is ostensibly a fruit flavor (cherry, strawberry and watermelon are the most obvious examples) don’t so much taste like their real-world fruit namesakes as much as they taste like some kind globally accepted alternate universe candy namesakes. That is to say, a cherry flavored Wonka ring-pop tastes very much like a cherry flavored Charms Blo-pop which tastes exactly like a cherry flavored Jolly Rancher candy which tastes mostly like a cherry flavored Dum Dum lollipop, which is much like a cherry flavored Drummond spiral-pop (the kind that come in those long, clear cellophane bandoliers you used to be able to get at K-Mart). My point is they all taste the same, yet none of them bear the slightest resemblance to a real cherry’s flavor at all.
So, how did these come to be accepted as a cherry’s flavor?
Did they perhaps start out actually resembling a real cherry’s flavor, and gradually degrade into an unrecognizable hybrid? Like the Chihuahua’s bloodline evolving from the timber wolf’s?
No, the real answer is far stranger…
Recently I read about the Department of Standards and Practices in Cambridge England. There, guarded and protected, are THE DEFINITIVE examples of weights and measures that set the standard for the world. They have THE standard twelve inch ruler that is the template for the billions of rulers and tape measures around the planet. There they have THE copper weight that is the one and only globally accepted standard kilogram. Yes, they have the items that are used to calibrate almost every measure.
Somewhere, under heavy guard, in a jar, sealed with wax, under lock and key, is THE standard cherry lollipop, well over a hundred years old now.
Every twenty or so years, with great fanfare, a beurocrat enters the room, presents his credentials to the seargent-at-arms who, if they are acceptable, opens the lock and unseals the jar. The well trained beurocrat licks that lollipop, and using that information he determines what the accepted flavor of cherry lollipops should be the world over.
So that’s why cherry lollipops don’t taste like real cherries. They are based on a hundred year old in Cambridge England.
Inky
