maybe this is crazy, but were the California Raisins invented to counteract a grape boycott?

over the years california grapes suffered 3 boycotts: The first ran from 1967 to 1970, and ended when growers signed their first contracts with the United Farm Workers. The second grape boycott began in 1973 and received more widespread support than the recent one (with a 1975 Harris poll indicating that 17 million Americans were boycotting grapes). This boycott ended two years later, after the Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed, allowing farmworkers to organize and bargain for contracts. in 1984 UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez called for a third boycott, as a way of focusing on the spraying of dangerous pesticides, and although UFW called the boycott successful, it lasted for 16 years (!) until november 2000, far less wham bam than previous efforts.

So the California Raisins were unleashed on the world in 1987, 3 years after the start of the last boycott, and were, duh, super successful, spawning a cartoon show, toys, live shows, all kinds of bullshit. even as a kid i always wondered why they even existed– i never saw an ad for bananas, for example. so is this why they made the ads? are the California Raisins like, scabs? i mean, outside of the fact that they look like huge scabs? does anyone have the numbers on california table grapes sold from 1984 - 1987? this coul dbe a good term paper for someone (someone that would subsequently owe me something for the idea, possibly fair trade organic chocolate bars, possibly lots of them).

also, buddy miles was the voice of one of the raisins, you may know him as the annoying guy on that band of gypsy record. what’s up with that?

anyway, we have this historical statue, it’s, i don’t know, $4.

oh, and sorry about all the capitalization weirdness, i obviously copied the statistics from another webpage (here).