Cherry Pie!

Do we really want the government counting cherries in our pies?

Who doesn’t like a nice thick slab of pie? Maybe a little vanilla ice cream on top after it’s been heated up a little bit, or possibly a wedge of sharp cheddar?

But how many cherries are in your piece? And, heaven forbid are any of them blemished? Enter the good old Food and drug administration. You see in an excess of regulatory gusto the agency came up with a law, designated Sec. 152.126 Frozen cherry pie. In this law it tells you that in any frozen cherry pie a quarter of the total weight must be cherries. And no more than 15% of those ruby red babies can be , in the charming rhetoric of our government be blemished with a scab, hail injury, discoloration, scar tissue, or other abnormality.

But, and this is a pretty big but… maybe the size of your butt if you eat too many pies-the gov boys apparently could care less about your rights when it comes to all other frozen fruit pies. They don’t have a law for apple, peach, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, or my personal favorite, blueberry.

And in my personal frozen pie eating experience I have yet to find a pie that I thought was short changing me in the fruit department. But that’s just me and maybe I was lucky.

There is something odd about all this. Why would the all powerful United States government spend so much time and effort to protect our cherry pie rights and ignore our other fruit pie rights?

I could be way off base here but I am thinking it has something to do with George Washington and that cherry tree he chopped down.