Dear Whole Foods,

This is how much I wanted fresh sour cherry pie: we drove an hour over twisty, nail-biting mountain roads to Santa Cruz to a nursery that had a single English Morello tree left and set aside for me and then we did that drive in reverse. I cleared out gravel that went a foot deep, left behind by the former owner’s gardening plans. I planted it. I watered it. I rescued it from a huge Japanese beetle invasion by scouring the Internet and then a friend scraped off his barbecue grill for me and I scattered the ash on the beetles at night and watched them fall off dying and turning into fertilizer to put back the leaves they’d stripped off that tree.

And it survived. But fruit was a long way off; it took two years before it actually started growing.

It’s doing great now, thanks for asking, and even in the drought we got ten pounds of those little cherries the last two years, enough to invite friends to help with the picking for their own pies.

And I learned: you really really want to pit every one of those tiny things by hand before you throw them in the freezer for Christmas baking. Trust me, you do. So I spent hours pushing down with all my weight on that pitter to get them to skewer the way they were supposed to skewer: no pit left behind.

There were none. Go me.

Now, I don’t go to your store all that much but I do appreciate how easy it is for my dairy-allergic child to find what she needs there, and so it happened that I had a twinset of your pie shells in the freezer for her. “Palm fruit” rather than palm oil? Give your marketing crew my regards.

Now, one would think that after driving over dangerous Highway 17 to get that tree, planting the tree, taking care of the tree, picking the tree, pitting the cherries, and freezing them in two-pound pre-pied amounts that I would also go to the bother of making my own d*** pie crust, but, today, I did not. My tree is in bloom, there’s more fruit coming soon to make way in the freezer for and heck, I just wanted to taste that goodness again. Badly.

I know that you’re trying to Save The Earth (TM). I know that you don’t want those earthmoving monster trucks to dig any more metal out of this beautiful planet than they have to, or heck, maybe you use recycled Cadillacs, I dunno, but I think that maybe–just maybe–you might want to think about having those aluminum foil pie tins be a little bit thicker.

Because: this is the tricky part, lean in close, I want you to hear me on this one: when you put the filling into that crust, or indeed when you take the culmination of your glorious work out of the oven, the tin underneath isn’t supposed to, indeed for the satisfaction of your customers absolutely cannot, accordion itself in the center and flop over like a dying fish.

Chinette paper plates are far stronger than your attempts at playing heavy metal.

Picture taken before I dropped my phone in the goo charging side down.