For better or worse, we humans create symbols from nature, and in our poetry and mythologies we have somewhat fetishised it. Fruits have helped humanity to flourish, from foraging to farming, and from shining skins to plush fleshes they delight us. It was golden apples which were cultivated by the Norse goddess Iðunn, and a golden apple offered by Paris to the most beautiful goddess - Aphrodite - which trigged the Trojan War. Yet it was the red apple which the serpent of Eden used to tempt Eve, and Disney’s Snow White too fell to its charms. Perhaps apples connote a risky temptation, whether the "warm apple pie” Jim Levestein made love to in the emblematic ‘American Pie’, or in the “apple bottom jeans” that drove Flo Rida so crazy in 2007’s ‘Get Low’.

Humans make much ado about sex, and maybe this is most evident in our treatment of cherries, and their association with the blossoming of sexuality - in girls in particular. If you can tie a cherry stem in a knot using only your tongue it’s a sure sign you’ll be a good kisser, while you consider who you want to ‘pop your cherry’. In 2008 Katy Perry sang about how she once kissed a girl and she liked it, especially the “taste of her cherry Chapstick”, used by teens too immature for lipstick, and also slang for an engorged red clitoris. Experimentations with lesbianism aside, there are darker connotations to cherries: Lana del Rey, infamous for her sexualisation of Nobokov’s Lolita, claims “my pussy tastes like Pepsi-cola, my eyes are wide like cherry pies, I got a taste for men who’re older” - fetishisation of underage girls runs rampant, and a Google search for ‘Japanese schoolgirl uniform’ rapidly turns pornographic, and for westerners it seems short-skirted schoolgirls have become as iconic a symbol for Japan as cherry-blossom, where they may travel to indulge in ‘JK Cafes’, a popular trend of establishments where middle-aged men pay to flirt with underage schoolgirls. But aside from their sweet pink flesh, it is not ignored that cherries tend to grow in pairs, and so too do young friendships, as Shakespeare’s Helena cried in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “…have you forgotten? Our friendship in our schooldays, our childhood innocence?…We grew together like twin cherries—which seemed to be separate but were also together—two lovely cherries on one stem.”

While the Chinese have rhapsodised about peaches for thousands of years, and grape wine has come to mean the blood of Jesus Christ, some symbolisms have erupted immediately by happy accident, such as the emoji keyboard’s Japanese eggplant’s length and girth, which rapidly gained meaning as a penis, to the point that Instagram has banned the eggplant emoji from searches, for fear of all the ‘dick-pics’ it might generate. To send a man a solitary eggplant emoji has the power to begin a dialogue of genitalia, or it may be sent to girl as an offer of dick pics. Unsolicited or desired, dick pics are our culture, as are cherry stems and golden apples.