Remember when we used to throw away overripe bananas instead of making banana bread?

I was going through my grandma's old recipe box last month and found a handwritten note from 1993 about swapping applesauce for oil in baked goods. She lived in a small town near Columbus and wrote that she started doing it after the 1992 drought made cooking oil prices spike. It got me thinking about how we used to toss bruised fruit without a second thought, but now everyone knows about banana bread or smoothie packs. Has anyone else noticed their pantry swaps getting more creative just from watching what's about to go bad?

2 comments

2 Comments

bettyroberts18d ago

Hold on there. The 1992 drought wasn't really what made cooking oil prices spike. That was the year after the 1991 Gulf War, oil prices went nuts because of that whole thing. Droughts mostly hit corn and grain crops, not cooking oil directly. Your grandma was smart though, swapping applesauce is a good trick. We definitely all learned to stop being so wasteful with food somewhere along the line.

janarivera18d ago

You hit the nail on the head about the Gulf War thing. I always had it in my head that droughts were the main reason prices went up back then. Never even thought about the connection to the war the year before. Your explanation makes a lot more sense now that I look at the timeline. It feels like one of those things where you just accept a story without questioning it. I guess that's why my grandma's applesauce trick always seemed like a weird fix for the wrong problem.