Decoder Ring - A Prune by Any Other Name

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The delicious, healthful prune has long had a cross to bear: It’s best known for making people poop. In the late 1990s, the California Prune Board set out on a quixotic mission to amend this sales-flattening reputation. It would attempt to rechristen this ancient fruit in the hopes the prune could one day be as unencumbered as an apricot, a raisin, or a fig.

In a world where every product and person increasingly believes it’s one good rebrand away from changing how they are seen, the story of the prune’s attempt to become the “dried plum” is a telling tale about the impossibility of escaping who you really are—and the freedom that comes with self-acceptance.

You’ll hear from Richard Peterson, retired Executive Director of the California Prune Board; food writer and chef David Liebovitz; lawyer and lobbyist Dan Haley; and Kiaran Locy, Director of Brand and Industry Communications at the California Prune Board.

This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited by Evan Chung, our supervising producer. It was produced by Katie Shepherd. Decoder Ring is also produced by Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.

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Sources for This Episode

Barry, Dave. Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, Ballantine Books, 2002.

Brasher, Philip. “FDA Approves Prune Name Change,” ABC News, Feb. 1, 2001.

Brasher, Philip. “Where's the beef? Kids give prune burgers the taste test,” Associated Press, Jan 29, 2002.

Cimons, Marlene. “A New Wrinkle for the Prune Industry,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 1999.

Crespi, John M., Harry M. Kaiser, Julian M. Alston, and Richard J. Sexton. “The Evaluation of Prune Promotion by the California Dried Plum Board,” The Economics of Commodity Promotion Programs: Lessons from California, Peter Lang USA, 2005.

Davis, Glenn. “French History in Your City: San Jose, California - the Pellier Brothers,” Yale National Initiative, Sep. 2015.

Fabricant, Florence. “In France, the Prune Holds a Noble Station,” The New York Times, Oct. 31, 2001.

Fabricant, Florence. “Responsible Party: Richard Peterson; Rejuvenating The Humble Prune,” The New York Times, Aug. 13, 2000.

Fabricant, Florence. “Underapprecaited: The Humble Prune,” The New York Times, Oct. 12, 1983.

A Fortune In Two Old Trunks. Sunsweet, 1947.

Fullan, Genevieve. “In Defense of Prunes,” Eater, Jun 21, 2022.

Gellene, Denise. “New Wrinkle in an Old Story,” Los Angeles Times, Oct 16, 1997.

Good Wrinkles. Sunsweet, 1951.

Kamen, Al. “Sunday in the Loop: Plum Outta Luck,” Washington Post, Dec. 11, 1999.

Koger, Chris. “Dried plums no longer: California prunes have new brand,” The Packer, Nov. 15, 2022.

Lucas, Greg. “Who'd Have Thought? Pruneburgers / Juicy, tender and low-fat, they're surprising hits in school cafeterias,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 9, 1999.

Martin, Ronda Beaman. “Stan Freberg—His Credits and Contributions to Advertising,” M.A. Thesis, Texas Tech University, Dec. 1986.

McKay, Leonard. “Louis Pellier,” San Jose Inside, Sep. 25, 2006.

Morse, Rob. “Hold the prunes, hold the lettuce,” San Francisco Examiner, July 28, 1999.

“Prune gets $10 million makeover -- as dried plum,” CNN, Sep. 13, 2000.

Rao, Tejal. “In Praise of the Prune,” The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 16, 2017.

Roach, Mary. “The power of prunes,” Salon, Nov. 5, 1999.

Waters, Michael. “When the Dried Plum Lobby Tried to Make Pruneburgers Happen,” Atlas Obscura, April 13, 2018.

Zasky, Jason. “Prunes: Turning Over a New Leaf,” Failure Magazine, Apr. 16, 2002.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we begin, just a heads up that this episode contains some dirty language.
0:10.5	This is an episode 20 years in the making.
0:14.8	I remember exactly how it began, when a 32-ounce clear plastic container caught my eye.
0:22.8	It was full of a reddish liquid and had a sky blue and purple wraparound label,
0:28.1	spotted with bright yellow proclamation saying that this new product was 100% juice.
0:34.7	And that juice came from the fruit depicted on the label. A dusky purple orb with a green
0:41.1	leafed stem, a plum. This new product was called Plum Smart, a plum juice for digestive health.
0:51.4	Plum Smart is clinically proven to help regulate your digestion with a unique blend of
0:56.0	prebiotic fiber, magnesium, and potassium.
0:58.0	I feel better already.
1:00.0	And I remember all this like yesterday, because I took one look at this so-called plum juice
1:06.0	and I thought, wait a minute.
1:10.0	Isn't that just prune juice?
1:14.4	Now I'm surely not alone in being able to imagine why a company might want to conceal the identity of prune juice.
1:22.2	So I made a joke to my friends like, nice try prune juice. I see you.
1:30.0	And then I promptly stopped thinking about this so-called plum juice for a couple of decades. But then, this past year, it happened again.
1:38.0	This time, it was a large, bright yellow resellable bag sitting on a shelf at Costco that caught
1:43.3	my eye. It, too too was dappled with
1:45.9	those same purple orbs of fruit. And right there on the package it said, dried plums.
1:53.7	Now believe me when I tell you, they were obviously prunes. What was going on? This time, I did not make a joke, or I didn't only make a joke. This time I decided I needed to get to the heart or the pit of the matter. And as I did, I came to understand that these plum products I had been scoffing
2:19.6	at for literal decades were proof of nothing less than a full-blown dried fruit identity crisis.
2:26.9	It turns out all these years, prunes have been going through it, and not just digestively speaking.
	...

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