Maybe in one special case....

If you're looking for Blue AND book in that order, you could use:

blue*book

Possibly the commercial Excel add-in XL Companion (from yours truly).
The current issue of "The Office Letter" has some comments about it...
  http://www.officeletter.com/current.html
About 1/3 of the way down the page.

Do you want the actual locatiion of each list item in the cell to be tested?
or perhaps one of these sugestions....

With
A1: My pear tastes like an apple.

If you want how many list items are in the cell
B1: =SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIF(A1,"*"&{"apple","pear","banana"}&"*"))

In that case, B1 returns 2

OR...If you just want to know if the cell contains any of the listed items?
or
B1: =MAX(COUNTIF(A1,"*"&{"apple","pear","banana"}&"*"))>0
In this case, B1 returns TRUE

In both of those examples, you could put the list in a range of cells,
instead of embedding them in the formula.
Example:
D1:    Apple
D2:    Pear
D3:    Banana

B1: =SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIF(A1,"*"&D1:D3&"*"))

Does that help?
***********
Regards,
Ron

XL2002, WinXP