Cranberries

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is a time
of year when it's popular for people to argue about food,
one of my least favorite activities. I'm laughing. I'm laughing

(00:25):
because it's always time to argue about food, but they're
specific foods this time of year that are the subject
of arguments. Yeah, I hate it. We can talk about
that behind the scenes on Friday, but I sure hate
the food arguments anyway. A lot of the talk that
pops up around the holidays is about what kind of
cranberry sauce people have at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and

(00:46):
other holiday feasts. If you have them, we'll talk about why.
I hate that entire argument. But it reminded me that
I actually put Cranberry's on my list a while back,
and then I kind of spaced out about them. They
got on my list because one of my BFFs is
a cranberry girl. I call her Cranberry Queen. She may
or may not have cranberry tattoos, and I love her,

(01:08):
and so I feel like a jerk for sitting on
this topic for so long after I put it on
my list. But we're going to talk about cranberries today
in their history. This is a largely North American episode.
Heads up, because cranberries are native to North America, the
cranberries we eat there are other cranberries not as popular
for eating, So, as Holly just said, the cranberries we

(01:30):
typically eat today are native to North America grown in
other places. Today, an estimated ninety eight percent of all
the cranberries are grown in the US and Canada, with
the US producing about four hundred thousand tons of the fruit.
Canada comes in at a little less than half of that.
Those statistics make this kind of obvious, but there's a

(01:53):
very clear belt across the northern United States and into
Canada that has the best conditions for growing cranberry's. Wisconsin
produces more than half of the cranberry is grown in
the US, which, as a Massachusetts resident, surprised me a bit.
Massachusetts actually comes in second. Both of those states claim

(02:13):
the cranberry as their state fruit or berry. I can
explain why that happens. Yeah, Massachusetts is a lot smaller.
I think if you did a density of cranberry production,
Massachusetts would probably be the number one, And I would
say that there is a lot of cranberry marketing in
New England Wisconsin also, Actually I could not say about

(02:36):
Wisconsin because I've only visited there a couple times that
it was years ago. Yeah, super popular in both places,
but I think it really just comes down to the
fact that Massachusetts is a much smaller state. Cranberries, you
may or may not know, actually grow on vines. Those
vines can grow as long as six feet and they
have kind of these stolens that grow up from the
vine that carry the flowers and ultimately the berries. So

(02:58):
the vine crawls along then and then there are these
kind of pieces that grow up from the ground into
the air, and that's where all of the action happens.
These vines are classified as perennial shrubs, and it actually
takes several years for a vine to mature to the
point that it bears fruit. If you're used to other
kinds of vining plants like squashes, this may be surprising

(03:19):
because they have like one season, But these guys are
long lived because once a vine does start to bear fruit,
it will bear fruit for years. Well cared for vines
last more than one hundred years. There are a number
of cranberry producers that say that they have vines that
are one hundred and fifty years old or more. And

(03:40):
then cranberries, once the fruit is ready in the autumn,
are harvested in two different ways. They can be picked
off the vine dry, but the much more common method
uses bog flooding. This has actually led to some confusion
as I was doing research. Every time I went to
like a cranberry producer's website, they were like, no, cranberries

(04:01):
don't grow underwater. So clearly a lot of people think this.
Cranberries do not grow in the water. They just do not.
So if you thought that, it's because you see the
bogs filled with water. And that's because in bog flooding,
the night before the harvest, growers pump in big farms
about a foot and a half of water into their
bogs and let it set overnight. Smaller producers may put

(04:24):
less water in, but the air pockets that are inside
cranberries cause some of the right berries to just pop
right off the vine and float to the surface on
their own. But then the next day after they've sat overnight.
The farmer takes a machine that's called a beater out
into the bog. It has this cylindrical wheel across the
front that beats the water and it combs through the
vines to pull the remaining berries off. Once all of

(04:47):
the berries have been floated, they are then corralled. They're
usually like these big straps that go around them to
keep them all together, and then they are shoveled onto
belts or lifts that carry them upward and then dump
them into a truck so that they can be carried
to a processing plant. There they will be washed and
prepped for the consumer market or food service supply, or

(05:09):
they then go to an additional processing center or even
within that same center to be canned or used for juice.
The wet method is faster and it costs less. It
requires about a quarter the number of people, and a
whole bog can be harvested in less than a day,
and that's why it's the most popular way to harvest them.

(05:29):
But because it takes the whole crop of the area
at once, it's likely that there are different levels of
ripeness across all those berries. With dry harvesting, it is
possible to pick individual berries, all of them at their
peak of ripeness, although that's obviously not especially efficient. Cranberries
are normally harvested from mid September to mid November, so

(05:52):
as fresh fruit, they have a small window for consumers. Yeah,
they do keep for quite a while, but in in
terms of like peak of freshness, it's not that long.
But the actual story of cranberries goes back way beyond
recorded history. So the movements of glaciers are credited with
carving out these sort of perfect areas that have a

(06:14):
mix of sand and clay with peat and additional soil
and rock debris. And this substrate, along with highly acidic
soil and a high water table, creates the perfect environment
for cranberry vines to thrive. Cranberry use goes back thousands
of years, at least twelve thousand years that we know of.

(06:35):
The Wampanog people reportedly started picking them that far back,
both to eat and to treat ailments. And these wild cranberries,
which the Wampanog called sesamunyish, were ground into a grit
style food sometimes other times they were combined with dried
meat and fat to make Pemmican, and that deep red
color of the berries was also used by these people

(06:56):
for dying cloth. So the cranberry is, to be clear,
called other things in other areas by different Native American tribes.
The Peacock called them a bimi, for example, but they
were using them in very similar ways to what we
described the Wampanog doing. There are also some cranberry varieties
that are native to Europe, especially to around Britain and

(07:18):
the Netherlands. So when colonists from Europe moved to North America,
they were already familiar with these fruit, although they had
not seen them prepared in the same way that the
indigenous peoples of North America did. The colonists learned these
other prep methods and also started using cranberries for juice.
It's often reported that Europeans referred to the berry as

(07:40):
a crane berry, because the flowers of the plant have
a similar profile to a sandhill crane. From there, that
word was eventually shortened to cranberry. Yeah, and I should
say that is the story that is given for it,
but maybe we don't have that well documented, and there

(08:00):
are some arguments that it's a little bit different. In
the etymology might be slightly different. The North American varieties
of cranberries were already well known to European colonists and
visitors to North America by the sixteen seventies. In the
book New England's Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents
and Plants of that Country, which was published in sixteen

(08:22):
seventy two and then republished in the nineteenth century, writer
John Jocelyn included an entry on cranberry's which read quote
cranberry or bearberry, because bears use much to feed upon them.
Is a small trailing plant that grows in the salt
marshes that are overgrown with moss. The tender branches, which
are reddish, run out in great length, lying flat on

(08:44):
the ground, where at distances they take root, overspreading sometimes
half a score about twenty acres, sometimes in small patches
of about a rude a root is roughly a quarter
of an acre or the like. The leaves are like
box he's referring to uxis, but greener, thick, and glistening.
The blossoms are very like the flowers of our English

(09:06):
night shade, after which succeed the berries. Hanging by long
small footstalks, no bigger than a hair. At first, they
are of a plain yellow color, afterwards red and as
big as a cherry. Some are perfectly round, others oval,
all of them hollow, of a sour astringent taste. They
are ripe in August and September. And his account also

(09:29):
mentions that cranberries are good for scurvy and for curing fevers,
and he mentioned something that sounds a lot like the
cranberry sauce lots of people make today, noting that the
indigenous people of the area quote use them much, boiling
them with sugar for sauce to eat with their meat,
and it is a delicate sauce, especially for roasted mutton.
Some make tarts with them, as with gooseberries. Coming up,

(09:54):
we're going to talk about an English naturalist and his
experience with cranberries, but first we'll have a sponsor brain. So,
as we said, this episode is largely about the life
of the cranberry in the US, but it did also

(10:15):
have developments in Europe. In seventeen sixty nine, English naturalist
Sir Joseph Banks made a note in his travel diary,
which was published posthumously as Journal of the right Honorable
Sir Joseph Banks Bart KBPRS during Captain Cook's first voyage
in HMS Endeavor in seventeen sixty eight seventy one to

(10:35):
Terra del Fuego. That is a misspelling the Odahiti, New Zealand, Australia,
the Dutch East Indies, et cetera. And he writes of them, quote,
here are also great plenty of cranberries, both white and
red arbutus rigida. The specific location that he saw these
berries is actually a little unclear, because he references in

(10:58):
this particular piece of writing that they are just outside
of Cape Saint Vincent, that's in Portugal. But this chapter
of his diary covers the time that the group was
traveling from Rio de Genero to Tierra del Fuego. So
it seems like he gets a little bit loosey goosey
with the names of other places and bodies of water,
because there are places in his journal where he qualifies

(11:20):
things by saying he thinks the name he mentions is
the correct one. So I believe he saw these cranberries
in South America, not off the coast of Europe. In
any case, these berries made an impression because over the
next couple of decades, Banks actually had some cranberry seeds
brought to Britain so that he could grow them himself,

(11:41):
and while these were cultivated there, they were not ever
intended for sale. This is because he was a botanist
and naturalist, but it also might have been a little
bit because while you can grow cranberries from seed, it
is not the preferred method. It's very difficult to ensure
their outcome because they have to be pollinated by local
bees and their pollen is too heavy to be carried

(12:02):
by the wind. And it is also unrealistic for someone
to manually pollinate an entire vines worth of berries. So
because bees are doing the work and it's local bees,
this means it is very easy for cross pollination to happen,
and that means it can lead to very different berries
then the seed plant may have produced. So if you
have a great cranberry vine and you're like, I'm going

(12:24):
to take the seeds from this, don't count on having
the same berries at the end of that process. Propagating
through cuttings from established vines is usually the preferred method. Yeah,
there are some plants that people manually pollinate today, but
like not with the number of flowers you would need
to pollinate as like a not at scale. Right, you

(12:45):
could do that at your house for fun, but even
then getting enough that you could make anything worthwhile might
be some effort. Yeah. Even as Banks was on his
voyage with cook cranberries were already popular enough in England
to occasionally appear in cookbooks. In seventeen sixty nine, The
Experienced English Housekeeper was written by Elizabeth Raffld, and she

(13:09):
included information about putting up cranberries for later use. Sometimes
this is described as preserving them, but you'll see there
wasn't really anything in the way of preserving the berries
other than just storing them properly. Quote, get your cranberries
when they are quite dry, put them into dry clear bottles,
cork them up close, and set them in a cool,

(13:30):
dry place. These are generally used as a garnish, and
cranberries are mentioned in other cookbooks of the era, also
for that purpose. North American cookbooks also included cranberry recipes
in the late eighteenth century, mostly for cranberry tarts. Yeah,
their tarts were also being made in England in the

(13:50):
nineteenth century. Queen Victoria became quite fond of cranberry tarts.
Apparently about a decade after Sir Joseph Banks was working
on growing cranberry in the eighteen teens, in the US,
North America got its first cultivated cranberry bed versus wildly growing.
This is credited to Captain Henry Hall. Hall had land

(14:12):
on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the town of Dennis, and
one day he noticed that he had wild cranberry vines
growing there. That winter of eighteen twelve, in anticipation of
particularly brutal low temperatures that had been predicted, Hall cut
down a lot of trees from his land that had
been growing in between his natural cranberry bog and the shoreline.

(14:35):
Without the natural windbreak of those trees. Over the winter,
sand from the shore got blown all over his cranberry bog,
and Hall's initial assessment was that this had probably ruined
his cranberries. But then the vines came back a few
months later and they were more vigorous than ever, and
these renewed vines were also naturally more resistant to pests.

(14:58):
Hall came to the conclusion that the addition of the
extra sand had actually been good for the plants, and
ongoing experiments proved that out. He was starting to cultivate
cranberries with the intent that they could bring in money,
something that had not really been done before, and soon
other people in Dennis started doing the same, as cape
Cod has exceptionally good conditions for the crop. As the

(15:20):
strongest and most productive plants were selected by Hall and
others for transplanting to controlled bogs, and they continued to
be tended and harvested. The prosperous plants started to set
the standard for North American cranberry vines. The Vaccinium macrocarbon,
a native North American variety, has become the most common
and the one that's normally grown as a crop. The

(15:43):
cranberry industry grew quickly and there was an interesting cycle
to its cultivation in New England coastal areas. So we
mentioned earlier that other people hundreds of years prior to
this were noting that these were good for scurvy. It
became common knowledge that cranberry's, which are rich and vitamin C,
were very good for long voyages because they stored very

(16:06):
easily and they could prevent scurvy. So as sailors retired
from their maritime work, some of them went into the
cranberry business to sell berries to the next generation of sailors,
and these new commercial bogs were often financed the same
way ships were, so people could purchase an interest in them,
so the entrepreneur behind them could pay to get it

(16:27):
up and running. This was how some ships worked in
the Golden Age. Another aspect of cranberry industry that's also
tied to the ocean started during this time shipments of
cranberries being sent to Europe for sale. As Christmas trees
became more and more common in the United States and Europe,
it makes sense that cranberries became part of the decor

(16:50):
for them. Cranberries could keep for weeks or sometimes even months,
and they had this shiny red exterior, so that made
them a natural match for the holiday season. So did
the timing of the cranberry harvest. Yeah. I read one
source that stated that this started in the eighteen forties,
but I couldn't find any definitive information about that. It's

(17:13):
not the kind of thing that probably got written down
a lot like today we start using cranberries on our trees.
I think it just happened, and maybe in somebody's journals
or letters or something like the children strong cranberries to
decorate the tree today. Yeah, I think the definitive part
is them going this is a novel idea which I
never found. Cranberry scoops, which are box like structures that

(17:36):
had times on one side so a person could scoop
through a bunch of cranberry greenery and come up with
just berries in the box, were invented starting in the
mid nineteenth century, and around this same time there were
experiments with water harvesting, but those did not go well,
and water harvesting was actually abandoned until the nineteen sixties.

(17:58):
Over the years when dry harvesting was the only method,
many different types of cranberry scoops were patented, a lot
of them with various improvements on previous versions, and one
man who held several patents was William T. Makepiece and
remember that name because it is going to come up again.
In eighteen fifty nine, a book with a somewhat confusing

(18:18):
title situation was published about cranberry's by author B. Eastwood.
The confusion lies in the fact that this book has
two title pages and they have different titles, so it's
sometimes cataloged by one name and sometimes by the other.
The first is the Cranberry and its Culture, and the
second is complete Manual for the cultivation of the cranberry

(18:39):
with a description of the best varieties. This book was
intended to educate interested readers on everything about raising cranberries,
but it was not intended for the home gardener, although
a home gardener could certainly benefit from the contents. As
Eastwood made clear and the introduction, though this book was
about business. He wrote, quote, everyone connected with agricultural pursuits

(19:04):
in this country must be aware that there exists at
present considerable anxiety respecting the best modes of cultivating the cranberry.
Having been attracted to this subject, that I paid particular
attention to it, with special reference to raising the berry
as an article of commerce. The book contains chapters that

(19:25):
walk the would be cranberry producer through everything from setting
up a bog, to selecting plants, to troubleshooting issues to harvest,
and it concludes with an entire chapter about cranberry markets
in the United States and how to sell at each one.
He even lays out the overhead costs that are associated
with cultivation and how to price berries, buy the bushel

(19:48):
to make a profit. Yeah, I mean like it has
hard numbers in it of like this is what I
paid this year to do this, So to me, I
have to charge this one like it's so completely di
and thorough. The Colombian Exposition of eighteen ninety three, which
is something of a recurring character on the podcast at
this point, featured an impressive exhibit that was mounted by

(20:10):
the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association. The group's members built
a miniature cranberry bog there on the expo floor to
show visitors to the expo how the berries were grown
and harvested. In eighteen ninety nine, the US adopted a
standard for cranberry's stating that each barrel was to be
one hundred pounds. That really didn't change things a whole lot.

(20:32):
Most growers were already loading barrels at one hundred pound mark,
but it did codify the practice. All Right, it is
just about time to talk about canned cranberry sauce. Right
after this sponsor break, we will hear about the man
who impacted the cranberry industry probably more than anyone else
in history, and how he gets credit for canned cranberry sauce.

(21:02):
If you've ever wondered who gets the credit for canned
cranberry sauce, that honor, depending on your point of view,
goes to Marcus L. Uran. We don't know if that's
the correct pronunciation, but other variations sound unsavory. Uh, So
we're going with this one in my apologies if that
is your last name. Uh but I know that in

(21:23):
a situation where we're going to say it a lot,
I don't trust myself for sure to not accidentally say
it the wrong way. Uh Uran was born in Sullivan, Maine,
on October second, eighteen seventy three, and after his early
education in the public schools of Sullivan, he attended the
University of Maine to get his bachelor's degree and then

(21:44):
went on to Boston University Law School. Uran passed the
bar and started his law career. But then in nineteen
oh six, on what almost seems like a whim, he
decided to ditch his law practice and buy a cranberry bog.
That's kind of funny to me, honestly. This was the
start of a lifelong dedication to the growing of cranberries

(22:05):
and the stewardship of all cranberry production. In the United States.
In terms of modern influence, Uron probably has had more
impact than anyone on the US cranberry industry, and part
of that was because he was very good at organizing
and working with other growers. Uron went on to organize
the American Cranberry Exchange to market fresh cranberries, the first

(22:29):
of many organizations he founded for the crop. But though
he got into the cranberry business to sell them as
fresh produce, Uran also, as we mentioned, is credited with
inventing canned cranberry sauce. Before any listeners turn him into
the villain of the piece, please know that that original
canned sauce was a lot more like the homemade sauces
of today. The story goes that when fresh cranberries are

(22:53):
packaged in barrels, the ones on the bottom always sustained
some damage from the weight of the berries that are
piled on top of them. They end up crushed and
unsuitable for sale on the produce aisle. Throwing out those
crushed berries bothered Uron. It felt wasteful and like he
was losing out on some of the potential sales after

(23:13):
all of the effort that growing the cranberries required. Then
he had a brainstorm, what if he cooked those berries
down and made a sauce that could be canned. So
that is what he did. That is the way the
story is often relayed. It comes up in his obituaries,
and crushed berries might have been part of the inspiration
for canned cranberry sauce. But the other thing to consider

(23:37):
was the short cranberry season. As we've mentioned, cranberries are
usually harvested mid September to mid November, so as a
fresh fruit, the window is kind of small for consumers.
But Yuran knew that if he could find a way
to can them, he could make them a year round business.
In nineteen thirty, he founded the National Cranberry Association, which

(23:57):
was a co op of growers. The NCAA eventually reorganized
as Cranberry Canners. Twenty seven years later, it would change
to a different familiar name, Ocean Spray. Uron teamed up
with two partners in this move, John C. Makepiece and
Elizabeth Lee. To be clear, Uron was not the first
person to organize a cranberry co op. The year he

(24:19):
bought his first bog nineteen oh six, the Wisconsin Cranberry
Sales Company was formed. It also operated as a co op.
The Makepiece family was the largest cranberry producer in the
country at the time. Remember those patents for scoops, Those
were issued to another Makepiece from Barnstable, Massachusetts, where John C.
Makepiece was from. So presumably they were related, although Holly

(24:43):
struggled to find information that would really pinpoint exactly how
they were related. Yeah. I combed through some rabbit hole
genealogy situations and I was finally like, okay, but what
are the odds that two make Pieces from Barnstable. What
We're both involved in the cranberry industry at this level

(25:03):
and entirely unrelated to one another by any means, Right, right,
I'm pretty sure they are connected. Under Uran's leadership, Ocean
Spray started testing a variety of different products. Cranberry Juice cocktail,
which adds sugar and sometimes other juices to cranberry juice,
was introduced by the company in nineteen thirty three, and it,

(25:24):
of course continues to be a flagship product today. And
as the nineteen thirties came to a close, Uran developed
a cranberry syrup to use in cocktails and sodas, and yes,
jellied cranberry sauce was introduced by the company. It made
its debut in nineteen forty one. Uran's partner in the
co op, Elizabeth Lee, was making cranberry sauce for sale

(25:47):
well before she teamed up with Uran. In nineteen seventeen,
she started selling a homemade sauce called bog Sweet Cranberry Sauce,
and it was very popular, so when she joined the
co op, she brought an expertise to the table. She's
said to have had a significant hand in the development
of jellied cranberry sauce. Co Ops that essentially controlled the

(26:09):
market at the level that Urans did would normally run
up against antitrust laws, but his lawyer was able to
identify a loophole in that law that was an exemption
for agricultural cooperatives that had been established in nineteen twenty two,
so Uran and his partners, who had been his competitors
before they all banded together, were protected in this setup.

(26:31):
Uron felt very strongly about co ops being the best
way for any agricultural product to thrive. He routinely toured
and gave talks about it, noting that quote no individual
can materially improve his own position independent of others. Marcus
Huron believed in cooperation over competition, and he thought that

(26:52):
if people could put aside their concerns about trying to
succeed in a way that hoarded marketshare, almost any industry,
but as especially agriculture, could really thrive. He proselytized that
co ops led to greater control for growers, enabling them
to essentially dictate the market. When he was in his eighties,

(27:13):
Muran was technically retired, but he was still really busy
in the cranberry industry as an advisor, a mentor, and
an organizational leader, and he was asked why he had
dedicated his life to Cranberry's. He said, quote, I felt
I could do something for New England. You know, everything
in life is what you do for others. In addition
to Cranberry's, Muron also offered the leadership to other enterprises

(27:36):
that tied back to the Cranberry business. He was the
director of the Springfield Bank of Cooperatives, offering loans and
financing to co op members. That bank eventually merged with
Cobank in the nineteen nineties. He also served as the
head of the National Canners Association and the Massachusetts Canners Association,

(27:56):
as well as the Boston Chamber of Commerce also so
established a scholarship which continues today. The recipient quote must
be a child of a cranberry bog owner or a
cranberry bog employee residing in Massachusetts who plans to pursue
an education beyond the secondary school level. In the late
nineteen fifties, government reports were published just a couple weeks

(28:19):
before Thanksgiving that deeply hurt the cranberry industry. An investigation
had found that some of the weed killer that was
sprayed on cranberry crops was carcinogenic. Marcus Huron gave interviews
during this scare and noted, quote, the industry won't get
over this for years. People are timid about these things,
especially when cancer is mentioned. You can't blame the government

(28:43):
for being careful. And if there is any danger, we
certainly want to know about it. We want to do
what is right. But although Uran seemed very understanding of
the government's report, he also told reporters that he thought
the whole thing had been mishandled. He noted that only
fifty thousand barrels out of one point two million were affected.

(29:03):
That's still a huge number, but it's only about four
percent of the total crop. It seems like identifying the
singular source of contamination would have been a more prudent
move for the industry in his opinion. And as I said,
this report came out right before Thanksgiving, which meant that
a lot of farmers were going to have a catastrophic
year because the entire industry was going to have to

(29:25):
dump their supply for the year and start from scratch
for the next year. One of the ways the government
tried to mitigate the fallout from the scare was to
start a labeling program so customers would know if they
were buying berries that had been inspected and cleared. But
as Yuran noted, for the nineteen fifty nine crop, it
was just too late. Later examination of the case did

(29:47):
back up uron position that while the information was important,
the way that it had been shared was a little
too alarmist, which reminds me of so many things that
still happened today. Yes, the amount of cranberries that a
person would have to eat to actually experience the negative
effects that had scared consumers was more than any reasonable

(30:10):
person could actually consume, Like they would have to eat
thousands of pounds of cranberries. Listen, I love a cranberry,
and I can't imagine eating one thousand pounds of it.
So uh. Perhaps because of that nineteen fifty nine scare,
US cranberry growers were the first in the agricultural community
to stop using the insecticide known as DDT as soon

(30:32):
as reports emerged about its potential toxological effects. This was
an action that these growers took before any regulation banning
DDT existed. Today, only about five percent of the US
cranberry crop is sold as fresh fruit. The rest is juices, preserves,
and cranberry sauce. By the twenty teens, more than five

(30:54):
million gallons of jellied cranberry sauce was being consumed in
the US annually. But there is a push to move
fresh cranberries into a more prominent position as a food
that people can just snack on, as well as something
that can be used in recipes without the need for
as much sugar. Cranberries are generally pretty tart, so they're

(31:14):
not the kind of thing that most people want to
just pop in their mouth and eat raw, but new
strains are being developed to make milder naturally sweeter berries.
And this is work that started decades ago, but it
does take time to shift the flavor profile of a
fruit that has often grown on the same vines year
after year for a century or more. One of the

(31:34):
other things that's impacting cranberry production is climate change. Cranberries
require a very specific climate in addition to a unique
substrate mix. The plants need a specific amount of time
in cold weather to be dormant in order to flourish
again when the weather warms up. And as the globe
experience is extremes in weather, the consistency this crop craves

(31:57):
and needs is dissipating. Something that's concerning cranberry growers around
the world. It's not a secret that the climate in Massachusetts,
for example, is warmer than it used to be. Uh yeah,
so that's cranberry's We love them. I will talk about
the milana behind the scenes. I have a very special
listener mail. It's from our listener, Holly Fry. Really, it's

(32:19):
from other has come up in some other emails, and
I wanted to make sure people knew it relates back
to our episode on patterns. Sewing patterns. Uh huh, because
at the end of that we didn't know what was
happening with the future of commercial sewing patterns, right, and

(32:41):
then there was an event and I meant to talk
about it sooner, but here we are. I'm a couple
months late. So where we left off in that episode,
Simplicity Patterns, which at that point had taken ownership over
Vogue Patterns, McCalls, and Butterick. The Big four is what
they're called in sewing Circles, had been sold to a

(33:04):
company that was essentially going to liquidate them. However, there
was a very cool development late in the game, which
is that in very late October, it was announced that
it was going to relaunch as an independent employee led
brand Abby Small. This is just in case anybody didn't
know Abby Small working with a company called Ruberlman Capital

(33:27):
took control of the company. She had been with the
company for a very long time, so she knows the
industry very very well, and this way they were going
to be able to launch. They had this period where
they were putting out messaging that was like, hey, please
hang tight, we're trying to basically start a small business
out of a business that's been around for a long time.

(33:49):
Like they had to get everything under their feet, but
they did relaunch, so just FYI, they have relaunched in
time for holiday season if you want to buy some
of the pattern. But I wanted to mention this because
for the stitchers in our listening audience, I know there
was some consternation. I mentioned that independent brands are great,

(34:09):
but I also know that for some people, these are
the patterns they have grown up with and they like
to work with, and they were going to miss them.
So they are back around and they are launched now.
So I would say if you want to make sure
they stay around, now is a great time to buy
a pattern, just to make sure they have that initial
surge and that they have support from their community that

(34:30):
wants them. Theoretically, I'm super excited actually for it, because
I think making this a company that's run by people
who know this business and they've worked in it for
literal decades. Yeah, is probably the best thing that could
have happened. Yeah. That's kind of really my PSA and
not a listener mail today, but especially because I don't
know about anybody else, but my high productivity sewing time

(34:55):
is the holidays because it's a little quieter home. Yeah,
work hours or tend to be a little shorter because
you have days off and depending on where things land,
they're like sometimes extra days in the calendar where you're
not working. And what a great time to support the
brands that have been around for hundreds of years and

(35:17):
are now you know, the flags being carried by people
who love those brands, so I want them to succeed.
It's very selfish on my part because I want them
to stick around. It's my update. I promise we'll do
a regular listener mail next time. If you want to
write to us to talk about sewing, I'll always talk
about sewing. I have. One of my favorite things is

(35:38):
that my friends will occasionally text me and be like,
can I bug you with a sewing question? And I'm like,
why do you think this would bug me? This is
a delight for me. Let's talk about sewing. If you
want to email us about sewing, about cranberries, listen. I
know people have strong feelings. Listen to Friday I have
Thoughts or anything else. You can do so at History

(36:00):
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to
the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(36:23):
to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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