Perhaps you think cranberry sauce is somehow grown in a can and plops out just when you need it for Thanksgiving dinner. Or maybe some kind of berry fairy goes along picking cranberries from a bush and leaves them on the doorstep when it’s time to make the sauce. Only one of those things are true. Okay, neither is. Cranberries have a backstory and it doesn’t start in a can or on a bush.

We’re sure plenty of you do know that cranberries come from bogs, but for the rest of us, that’s where they lie in wait on their vines until what I will call cranberry fishermen come to harvest them.

CNNMoney does a much better job of explaining the work of the 700 family-owned farms that are part of the Ocean Spray co-op.

One of these farmers narrates the story of how cranberries are harvested when it comes time, as workers in waist-high waders shluff around helping the machines separate the berries from their vines, at which point they’re gathered into what looks like a big bathtub.

“We call it beating the berries,” he says of the machine that basically picks the berries from their vines. And if it looks like kind of a great time, what with all that berry herding, well, it is.

“It’s kind of a fun job,” he admits with no small amount of pride.

Sign me up.

See where cranberries come from [CNNMoney]

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