What does them being in 1 bag have to do with anything.

It's not as if they mix and match cherry fruits from different trees in different locations. They're probably ripped from one plant, it sounds completely reasonable for there to be some bags out there with 50% mutations.

Cherries look good to me I bet you just got lucky and picked a bag of everyone don't want's. So cherry up and let it go. Too many people worry about radiation and have nothing to worry about. You should be very happy not to live in Japan them poor people do on the other hand have a lot to worry about. If people put their money where their worry was it would be a much better Japan.Peace out

These cherries are very common. Malformed cherries are usually pulled and separated from the picture perfect ones. They are called either "doubles", which are the ones that look like two cherries in one or "spurs" which look like a second cherry shriveled up and died on the side.

Were the cherries on sale? Like I said, these cherries are usually pulled from the rest and they are still sold but at a discount and only to food sellers who don't require the cherries to be picture perfect. It makes sense that you found so many in one bag that way. My guess is that the place you buy these cherries at has simply lowered their fruit appearance standards, you have bought these cherries from a new spot or a rouge bag of doubles got mixed in with the shipment and you got "lucky".

Now as far as radiation? Who knows, I sure don't but I can tell you that the cherries appearance happens in nature, is very common and that they are routinely separated from good looking cherries so it makes sense that so many would be found in one bag and that many people are not use to seeing them.

I have been wondering about radiation as well, as I am a cherry addict and always have been. They may or may not be exposed to radiation but their appearance is not a by-product of radiation exposure, it is all to natural. I would go ahead and eat them, I like the doubles personally.

I took the photo of the "Chernobyl Cherries" on Flickr that someone referred to earlier in this thread. To clarify, they weren't really from Chernobyl. I just called them that because they looked mutated. Doesn't mean they were mutated by radiation or anything. I don't remember where they were from but they could have been from Okanagan, BC, Canada (I live in Vancouver), or could have been imported from California (where we get a lot of our fruit imports from).

Down south, New Zealand has a decent cherry industry and seconds bags will look similar, a lot more unusually shaped than 'grade a' cherries.

I grew up on a cherry orchard, and these cherries are sometimes quite frequent. Sometimes we'd get tree's where almost the majority of cherries were doubles, and this was more than ten years ago. Usually you take them to a processing plant to have them sorted and sold, but they usually remove these sorts of abnormal cherries (and charge you for every one they have to cull out of the batch). This was probably from a tree that tended to produce these abnormal cherries and the processing plant was lax in their culling. Cherry trees sometimes do some weird stuff. We had ONE tree in our 120 acre orchard that was of a Bing variety, and it made normal cherries for a couple years, then it started producing MASSIVE cherries the size of plums every year. We hoped to sell cuttings of it to cherry tree distributors and make millions off that tree, but unfortunately it died.

Interesting japan-related fact: Sometimes in japan they'd sell these double cherries individually in little boxes for 1-5 dollars a pop because they resemble hearts, and boys would give them to girls as romantic presents.