Fruits and Candy / Früchte und Bonbons

During middle school my favorite candies were Lemon Heads and watermelon Jolly Ranchers. The ice cream truck would park outside my middle school, and a couple days a week I would buy myself a treat. A tiny box of Lemon Heads was 10 cents and a Jolly Rancher was only a couple pennies. I'm not sure why I liked those particular candies. Certainly it wasn't for the genuine fruit flavors, and I've often wondered in years since how companies decide on that fake fruit flavor for their candies or popsicles or juices.

Grocery stores here sell fruits seasonally. A month or so ago, Spanish strawberries were in stock, every store have special strawberry deals such as two boxes for the price of one or simply crazy low prices. And then they disappeared. Grapes were in season a few weeks ago, mountains of grapes from South and Central America, but now they are out, nowhere to be found. This week, the stores have been flooded with Hungarian cherries, Spanish nectarines and apricots, Italian peaches, and Austrian strawberries.

Today I bought a 500 gram box (just over a pound) of strawberries for about $1.50 and a kilogram box (2.2 pounds) of peaches for about $1.30. Both boxes were perfectly ripe and the flavors were astonishing -- the exact same flavors you find in peach and strawberry candies! I've never experienced those flavors in something natural, and yet they are indeed natural. So the next time you treat yourself to a bag of peach rings or gummy strawberries, you can be confident that the flavors you are enjoying are real after all.