Friday Rant - you mean, that comes out of the ground?

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker the other day. I was headed to the farmer's market and asked if she wanted to come. Somehow the subject of cherries came up, and she said she wanted to get the dark red kind. This made me pause. I'm thinking in my head, "are there other colors of cherries?" (I just did a wikipedia search, and there are red, dark red, light red, and some yellowish ones).

But I didn't get the feeling she was talking about some strange variety of cherry. So I said I thought that cherries were generally dark red. And then she said something that blew my mind - "I want the dark red cherries, not the ones they put in martinis."

And there you have it - I completely understand this, because our society has become so divorced from the concept of growing food that sometimes we just don't know where it comes from. I suppose it isn't unrealistic to expect that a maraschino cherry is just a different variety of cherry, plucked off the tree and bottled (or, if you've never even seen it bottled and only seen it in martinis). And if you grow up in a city and never deal with the growing of food, well then all your information comes with whatever you're exposed to in tv, movies, and books (well, ok, then there's parents and friends too).

I read Small Wonder (Barbara Kingsolver) a while back and she made this very point. She and her family had a garden in Arizona, and when her kids' friends would come over, they'd go out and pick some veggies for dinner. And the friends would refuse to eat veggies that came out of the ground, because they had dirt on them, and they didn't believe that that's really where veggies came from (veggies come from the grocery store, don't they?).

I was guilty of this myself - my boss brought in a box of home-grown cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil for all of us in the office share (yummm!), and I went to grab a cucumber, saw dirt on it, and almost put it back. Then I pinched myself and took it anyway. Because while I wouldn't take a veggie with dirt on it in the big box grocery store, I knew he'd picked it that very morning, so it was perfectly reasonable for there to be dirt on it.

But is this a good thing, that we've come "so far" technologically and culturally and can get any fruit and veggie on earth, but we have no idea where they come from? I read Fast Food Nation earlier this year and it's true, I really didn't have a great idea where the meat I eat comes from. And I don't want to see any remnant of the animal in the food I'm eating (I can deal with fish heads and lobsters, but the idea of killing a chicken just kinda wigs me out). But I really didn't have a great idea of just exactly what the animal goes through between pasture (or pen, as the case may be) and my plate. I would've thought that the process would've improved since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, but apparently it hasn't necessarily (there are always the abattoirs that buck the trend mentioned in Fast Food Nation, but there are so many that don't).

Have you had any interactions of this, people (or you) just had no idea where the food comes from, or that a particular food was prepared and they thought it was natural? (for the record, a maraschino cherry has been macerated in flavored sugar syrup, then dyed, and is usually flavored with almond. Green maraschinos are mint flavored).