A New Wrinkle for Prune Festival

YUBA CITY, Calif. — Pity the poor prune. Celebrated for years as one of California's most important crops, the prune this year will find itself on the sidelines, wrinkled, dried out and ignored.

Instead, California's Sept. 8-9 Dried Plum Festival--formerly known as the California Prune Festival--will be dedicated to the prune's more presentable persona, the "dried plum."

Hoping to escape the medicinal whiff of the term "prune," U.S. growers won permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin marketing the product as "dried plums."

California produces 99% of all prunes grown in the United States. --Reuters