Some time between digesting Christmas dinner and putting your head back down to work, spare a thought or two for the cranberry. It is, of course, a (1)_____ of Christmas: merry bright red, bittersweetly delicious with turkey and the very devil to get out of the tablecloth (2)_____ spilled. But the cranberry is also a symbol of the modern food industry and in the tale of its (3)_____ from colonial curiosity to business-school case study (4)_____ a deeper understanding of the opportunities and (5)_____ of modern eating. The fastest growing part of today"s cranberry market is for cranberries that do not taste like cranberries. Ocean Spray"s "flavoured fruit pieces" (FFPS, to the trade) taste like orange, cherry, raspberry or any (6)_____ of other fruits. They are in fact cranberries. Why make a cranberry taste like an orange Mostly because it is a (7)_____ little fruit: FF PS have a shelf-life of two years. Better (8)_____, they keep a chewy texture (9)_____ baked, unlike the fruits whose flavours they mimic, which turn to (10)_____. The dynamic that has brought the cranberry to this point is (11)_____ to the dynamic behind most mass-produced goods. Growing (12)_____ provided the (13)_____ to create cheaper and more reliable supply. Cheaper and more reliable supply, (14)_____, created incentives to find new markets, which increased demand. Thus was the (15)_____ kept churning. The cranberry is one of only three fruits native (16)_____ North America, growing wild from Maine to North Carolina. (The others are the Concord grape and the blueberry.) The American Indians had several names for cranberries, many (17)_____ the words for "bitter" or, more (18)_____, "noisy". They ate the berries mostly (19)_____ pemmican, but also used them for dye and medicine. And they introduced them to the white settlers—at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, it is said. The settlers promptly renamed this delicacy the "crane berry", (20)_____ the pointy pink blossoms of the cranberry look a bit like the head of the Sandhill crane.