No Muslim bashing in this article -- today I want to talk about Cherries, my favorite fruit.

Cherries are in season and I picked up a few pounds yesterday in New York City's Chinatown for about $1.50 a pound. That's a lot cheaper than the going rate at local supermarkets here in New Jersey. But one has to be careful of the quality - many cherries may not be perfect. Caution is always in order whether you buy them in Chinatown or home markets - but if you look at enough cherries you can learn to tell whether they're worth buying.

So in the spirit of my previous articles on edible fruit prices, here is my investigation into how much actual fruit there is in a pound of cherries after removing the stems and Pits.

First, let's find out how much this woman saves by removing the stems from the cherries before the cashier weighs and rings them up. I took a pound of cherries (~~ 454 grams) and removed all the stems and found that they only weighed about 4.5 grams or about 1%. So if cherries are $4.00 a pound at your local supermarket, removing the stems saves you about 4 cents. Perhaps not worth the effort.

Before I get to the pits, let me say that it might be more practical to take the stems and dry them in the shade for later use in a cherry-stem tea. Simply put two to three tablespoons of crushed, dried cherry stems in a quart of boiling water for two minutes. Let cool to a drinkable temperature and enjoy a nice calming brew. However, read my Disclaimer below.

Now on to the pits. Taking the same stemmed pound of cherries and removing the pits resulted in approximately 27 grams of pits or about 6%. That's not as bad as I thought it would be. Thus a stemmed and pitted pound of cherries results in about 93% edible fruit - or about 14.9 ounces of fruit and 1.1 ounce of non-fruit.

My advice regarding cherry pits is the same as for the stems - don't throw them away. A good use for pits from all manner of fruits can be found here.