I hope you didn’t come to this blog hoping for an answer to that question. I meant it rhetorically – as in Why on earth do some people hate raisins in muffins?

The only people who have an excuse are the ones with sensory issues. That makes sense to me.

To people with mouth sensitivities, putting the crumbling dry texture of the muffin with the wet, squishy texture of raisins is EEW!

But what’s the excuse of those other non-raisin people? And who are they?

My son has sensory issues, so when we go visit Nonna and the cousins, she makes Muffins Without Raisins.

I have tried to get into them. Chew, chew, chew, absolutely no excitement. This is just bread.

My five-year-old nephew can’t stand it. He takes a mittenful of raisins and tries sprinkling them on top of the muffin. When they tumble off, he takes individual raisins, pokes them into the muffin with his tiny fingers, and looks balefully at Nonna.

I met my first raisin-muffin-hater when I was on my way to Peru with a group of North Americans to do aid work. In the prep meetings beforehand, a co-teammate actually refused a muffin on the grounds that it had a raisin in it, and raisins were disgusting. I shook my head. Do you have any idea where we are going?

Raisins save muffins from breadhood. So do cranberries and blueberries.

Without them, why bother?