this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Alright, bear with me here.
Back in the middle ages Europeans didn't have access to sugarcane. Because of that, they never even thought to try to breed sugary beets and process those into sugar. The same was true for tree sap or any other possible source of sugar, because why the hell would it even occur to them if they'd never seen sugar?
If a person in the middle ages wanted to make something sweet, their choices were to add honey or to add fruit. Honey was expensive, and the vast majority of the population of Europe were peasants. Honey wasn't something they'd have around all the time. While fruit was way easier to come by, it was only available seasonally. So how do you make a sweet cake in the middle of winter? Dried fruit!
So here's the big kicker about putting raisins in shit: it's been unnecessary for four goddamned centuries. There might be an occasional dish here or there that's been made the same way since before sugar was available, but there's no fucking excuse for it in like 95% of dishes. We live in an age where I - a regular dude who isn't particularly wealthy - can go to the grocery store a mile away and find a dozen kinds of produce that were shipped from the other side of the planet where they're in season. There hasn't been an excuse to ruin perfectly innocent cookies with raisins for hundreds of years.
Counterpoint: The Great Depression
I'm betting there wasn't a big price difference between granulated sugar and raisins back then.
Also your explanation doesn't cover why those recipes now include a diabetes inducing amount of sugar on top of the dried fruits
That's a separate issue that we (meaning humanity, not just America) is still dealing with.
During the second world war chemists figured out how to make cheap fertilizers and pesticides from petroleum. These two innovations shot farm productivity through the roof. Food became more abundant than ever before and therefore became incredibly cheap. Virtually overnight the biggest challenge to people's diets was having too much, not too little.
For the first generation or two living in this historic abundance, they had no way of seeing the coming health threats. Coming off of literally the entire history of life on this planet having too little to eat instead of too much, they weren't with a "more is more" approach. Cost of ingredients was no longer a barrier to adding more sugar, more salt, and more fat. At least in the US, there was a brief "convenience" fad in cuisine in the 11950s, but gears quickly shifted to increasing portion size and improving taste by the brute force addition of more salt and sugar.