>>>Goodbye, Raisin Bran
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>>The linguistic dissonance in the anglophone food, where the raw materials are in english but the ingredients for your meal are mostly french, made it rather difficult for me to know what to buy for lunch. Speaking of raisins, my daughters once hazarded a guess that a large percentage of Americans don't know what raisins really are. In serbian, it's easy, the raw stuff and the end products come from same language (it's the recipes where you encounter all the turkish, german, hungarian, italian and french names) - so it's suvo grožđe.
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>>Just curious, how many people do know what raisins are? Also, how many know that sweet cherries and sour cherries are distinct species - as they never saw them side by side, sweet cherries being sold (as what passes for) fresh, and the sour cherries in jars or cans.
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>I certainly know what raisins are and that sweet and sour cherries are distinct. Sweet cherries are for eating; sour cherries are for cooking and baking. <g>

Ah, but you may still remember seeing them on trees :). The question was about the urban folks.

Though, in that context, the question would be ridiculous here - we got fruit trees around the houses just about everywhere except in strict downtown. Anyone with 3-4 ares of space would have at least a couple. In the whole city of Virginia Beach (400K people) I've seen just a handful - one pear, one mulberry and a couple of cherries here and there. Saw two more mulberries - one in Charlottesville, near Rotunda, and the other one in DC, in the Serbian embassy's yard :).

>Probably since you left the country (because you left the country?), they now market prunes as "dried plums." I think prunes got a reputation as being for old people.

They are for the movement, actually :). And I kind of like the "dried plums" name, as a way to bridge the above linguistic gap. There's really no need to change the language when you dry them.