The Emperor's New Berry

Have we talked about cranberries yet? Have I told you how much I detest them? And yet they appear in everything, as if they had the same respectability and all-round popularity of ginger or vanilla.

This Emperor's New Clothes of berries is so foul-tasting that the only context in which it had success was as a dressing/sauce for that most foul-tasting of fowls, the turkey. Only turkey tasted bad enough to make cranberries taste good.

Yet you can't buy a fruit and nut mix without cranberry contamination, Eat Natural put cranberries in one of their bars (they try to disguise the horrible taste with chocolate), and you see cranberry loaves, cranberry juice, cranberry cheese and cranberry dog shit, I imagine. Sainsbury's report a 67% increase in cranberry demand. Of course they fucking do! They put fucking cranberries in fucking everything, though I certainly didn't "demand" it.

It's because of all this health food arse-wank, isn't it? It's all bloody marketing. Some numbskull tried to claim cranberries had healthful properties, on the basis that they taste so foul they must have. Probably. But here's a clue, health-nuts: there are plenty of healthy foods that don't actually make you gag.