Raisin D'Etre

I've probably written about raisins before, as they are such a curious food and so inappropriately placed with other foods (oatmeal cookies are an obvious example, but really any other food applies).  And here they are surreptitiously placed in this bag of trail mix.  I very rarely eat trail mix- a little too much like granola and other not-as-healthy-as-you're-led- to-believe foods favored by plaid-shirters.  This bag just says dark chocolate and cranberry on the label.  Maybe Birkenstockers know that the dreaded wrinklies are in trail mixes labeled or not, but I believe I've been duped yet again by those lying stinking marketing weasels.

But I'm really wondering just how cheap the guy was who started selling raisins. Now being on the food pecking order well below the wife, kids, and dogs, I thoroughly understand the toss vs. eat decision as I face it every day.  Just this noontime as my daughter asked for a hot dog for lunch- and she seems plenty old enough to make her own hot dog, by the way- I found three let's just call them "past prime" specimens in the refrigerator.  They weren't long from being science fair material, and the average person would have unflinchingly tossed them in the garbage at arm's length with perhaps a gag reaction.  But I'm a man, and what I see is a hard earned dollar being wasted.  Of course I can't give it/them to my daughter, as princess has a wide band of unacceptability surrounding expiration date issues, inherited from her mother.  That usually leaves it up to the dogs and me, though in this particular case, there may be near-meat products involved (I try not to eat mammals), so it's just dogs for the dogs that are in play.  Typically I'll just wash off/cut off/ignore the most offensive elements of most items.  Most of my meals are things that the rest of the family won't eat and I don't want to throw away.  Though sometimes I'll try to trick them, as I attempted this afternoon when I combined the three open bags of salt and vinegar chips into one bag.  The princesses will notice what are not freshly opened, though, so I'm just kidding myself.

Which finally gets me back to the raisins.  That guy had to be way cheaper than me to eat those really rotten grapes.  And then to think that he could sell a lost crop at a profit, what chutzpah.  And this was decades before people hit upon the "dried fruit" angle (prunes as dried plumes... genius).  So my real question is grapes are purposely grown to be raisins, or whether they're grapes that have gone bad or were inferior grapes to begin with.  

And then there's croutons...

 Image from shubtastic.blogspot.com