November 21, 2023 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, 400 million pounds of cranberries are consumed by Americans each year. Twenty percent of that is during the week of Thanksgiving. That's 80 million pounds! And 5,062,500 gallons of jellied cranberry sauce are consumed by Americans every holiday season. Here’s the History Guy to share the story of the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
and all show long, we're celebrating Thanksgiving with stories of
all kinds. And our next story comes to us from
a man who is simply known as the History Guy.
His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people
of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy is also
heard here at Our American Stories. Four hundred million pounds
(00:34):
of cranberries are consumed by Americans each year. Twenty percent
of that is during the week of Thanksgiving. That's eighty
million pounds in a week, and five million gallons of
jelly cranberry sauce are consumed by Americans every holiday season
as well. Here's the History Guy to share the story
(00:55):
of the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
The history of US regulation of domestically produced food and
pharmaceuticals goes back to the end of the nineteenth century
and a pioneering researcher named Harvey Washington Wiley, who was
the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture's Division of Chemistry.
And from those early beginnings a regulatory environment developed in
fits and starts over time, as consumers in government and
(01:21):
industry tied to develop the best way to protect the
nation's food supply, and one of the first great tests
of that regulatory environment came in nineteen fifty nine, when
a new regulation went into a venerable product and resulted
in what has been described as the nation's first great
food scare. The Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine
(01:42):
changed the way Americans looked at their food, trusted their government,
and consumed their cranberries. Its history that deserves to be remembered.
Born in eighteen forty four, Harvey Wiley was a Civil
War veteran who had degrees in both medicine and chemistry.
He was offered the post of Chief Chemists for the
Department of Agriculture in eighteen eighty two, largely because of
(02:04):
his expertise in the chemistry of sugar, as the department
was interested in growing a US sugar industry based on sorgum.
In the position, Whiley started conducting research into the adulteration
and misbranding of food and drugs on the American market,
including so called poison squad studies, where the effects of
a diet consisting in part of the various preservatives were
tested on human volunteers. The studies and subsequent publications moved
(02:27):
the public, including a campaign where a million US women
wrote the White House and spread Congress to pass the
landmark consumer protection act called the Pure Food and Drug
Act of nineteen oh six, also called the Wiley Act.
For his contributions, Wyley was popularly called the Father of
the Pure Food and Drugs Act. While they Act gave
the Division of Chemistry some regulatory power, its ability to
(02:49):
enforce regulation was constantly challenged, and the ever present wrangling
between industry and regulation led to a nineteen twenty seven
reorganization of the Division of Chemistry into the Food Drug
an insecticide organization, which then in nineteen thirty was renamed
the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. A growing consumer movement,
(03:10):
pressured by macrating journalists and events such as the tragic
mass poisoning caused by the untested pharmaceutical elixir sulfon ilamide
that killed one hundred people in nineteen thirty seven, pressed
Congress to give the FDA significantly more robust powers with
the nineteen thirty eight Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
The Act has been omitted many times, and today is
(03:31):
the center of the Food and Drug Administrations, which today
has nearly fifteen thousand employees and a budget in excess
of five billion dollars regulatory power. One of the amendments
to the Act was driven by James Delaney, a US
Congressman from New York, who shared a select committee to
conduct an investigation and study the use of chemicals, pesticides,
and insecticides in and with respect to food products. The
(03:54):
results of his findings resulted in the nineteen fifty eight
Food Additives Amendment to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act
that was commonly called the Delaney Clause. It read, the
Secretary of the Food and Drug Administration shall not approve
for use in food any chemical additive found to induce
cancer in man, or after tests found to induce cancer
(04:15):
in animals. The reasoning behind the strict nature of the
Delady clause was stated by influential researcher doctor Wilhelm Huper,
who testified before Congress. I do not believe that one
can establish a safe dose of carcinogens, he said. I
do not think that we have the method or evidence
available but which we can reliably determine a safe dose.
(04:35):
The legislation was undoubtedly well intended, but it would lead
to some thorny questions, as we have found out that
essentially pretty much anything can give a rat cancer if
you give it to a man a large enough dose.
And one of the first tests of the amendment had
to do with the berry from a dwarf evergreen shrub
called Vaccinium macrocarpin, otherwise known as the North American cranberry.
(04:59):
Cranberries are ant, hard, sour, and bitter. The name is
likely derived from cranberry and is because part of the
flour of the shrub resembles the neck, head and bill
of a crane. There are many craneberry varieties in Europe
where the name was derived, but the North American berries
were introduced to colonists by narrogant peoples who had harvested
wild berries at least from the sixteenth century, perhaps much
(05:19):
farther back. The berries were often ground with dried meats
into pemicana, highly nutritious preserved food that was a significant
part of Native American cuisine. The berries were also used
for red dyes, and due to their astringent qualities in
medical poultices. Despite the sour taste, they were recognized fairly
early for their nutritional value, with a sixteen seventy two
book noting they're excellent against the scurvy, a quality derived
(05:42):
from their high vitamin sea content. The same text noted
their sour tastes and said that they were generally boiled
down with sugar to make a sauce for meat that
is a delicate sauce, especially with roasted mutton. To understand
how cranberry fit in with the Delaney claws, you have
to understand the unique nature of the fruit. Grow on
trailing vines like a strawberry, but the vines thrive on
(06:03):
a special combination of soils and water properties found in wetlands.
Cranberries grow in beds layered with sand, peaked and gravel
that are commonly called bogs. The bogs were originally formed
by receding glaciers, which carved impermeable kettle holes lined with clay.
The clay lightning prevented materials from leaching into the groundwater,
and as the glaciers melted, rocks and organic materials were
(06:24):
deposited on top of the clay, creating the ideal environment
for cranberries, which require acid, peat soil, an adequate fresh
water supply, and a growing season. It extends from April
to November. Wild cranberries of Massachusetts, for example, flour in June,
in July and are ready to pick by September. North
American cranberries were being exported to Europe by the seventeenth century,
(06:46):
and recipes for preserving the berries, as well as making sauces, tarts,
and pies were common in the eighteenth century in both
American and English cookbooks. Still, because of their unique nature,
cranberries were still being collected wild, not cultivated.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you're listening to the history guy telling the story
of the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine. When
we come back, more of the history guy here on
our American Story Folks, if you love the great American
(07:33):
stories we tell and love America like we do, we're
asking you to become a part of the Our American
Stories family. If you agree that America is a good
and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift
of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast becoming
a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American Stories
dot com now and go to the donate button and
(07:53):
help us keep the Great American Stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our American
Stories and the story of the Great Thanksgiving cranberry scare
(08:15):
of nineteen fifty nine. The History Guy brings us back
to where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
It wasn't until the early eighteen hundreds at Henry Hall,
a veteran of the Revolutionary War who lived in Dennis, Massachusetts,
started to cultivate the berries. Hall noticed that sand blown
in from nearby dunes helped vines grow faster. By adding
sand in appropriate quantities per acre, yields of berries increased.
Modern growers still spread an inch or two of sand
on their bogs every three years. As the berries grow
(08:45):
on vines, the vines do not need to be regularly replanted,
and some Massachusetts vines are reputed to be over one
hundred and fifty years old and still producing fruit. Hall's
innovations allowed greater production than a commercial industry grew. That,
combined with a greater availability of granite related sugar, allowed
the fruit to grow in popularity. As it did, it
grew in association with the holiday season. The berries were bright,
(09:08):
shiny red, making excellent decorations. They were harvested and it
available in winter, and as they are so to spoiled,
lasted well through the Christmas season. The season was also
known for feasts of roasted meat, which went well with
cranberry sauce. Cranberries became so popular that after the Civil War,
successful efforts to grow cranberries in New Jersey leather what
(09:29):
has been described as a cranberry fever, a rush of
investment to grow cranberries that was largely a bust, as
the plants are finicky and the people hoping to get
rich quick had little understanding of how to actually grow them.
Cultivation methods solely developed, including less time intensive methods of harvesting.
This was largely the result of careful study of growing
factors and methods in the finicky nature of the plant
(09:51):
meant that the industry developed growers organizations early on, which
worked not just to help develop growing methods, but to
collectively market the product. The success of a century of
effort really showed in nineteen fifty nine, when the industry
had already become a fifty million dollars a year business,
and nineteen fifty nine looked to be a bumper record
crop one hundred and twenty five million pounds. Growers were
(10:14):
expecting to make record profits, and likely they would have
except for the Delaney clause. The problem was an herbicide
called a minute triazole, a chlorophyll inhibitor. A minute triasol
was used by cranberry growers starting in the nineteen fifties
to eliminate sedges, rushes, horsetails, and deep rooted grasses from
(10:35):
the bogs clearing the water for the cranberries. Growers were
instructed to use the chemical only after the harvests so
as to keep it off the finished fruit, but trace
amounts could still exist in extremely small quantities. Manufacturers petitioned
the US Food and Drug Administration to allow small amounts
of residue, up to one part per million if necessary,
but the FDA rejected the petition. There was a problem.
(10:58):
New research had suggested that large, long term doses of
the chemical suppressed thybroid function in rats, encouraging tumors possibly
cancerous to form. That made a minute triazole a carcinogen.
And while the study suggested that a rat would have
to eat a vast quantity of contaminated cranberries over its
entire life span to increase its risk for cancer. The
(11:19):
Delaney clause said that carcinogens were not acceptable in any amount.
When trace amounts of the chemical were found in a
part of the cranberry crop just seventeen days before Thanksgiving,
the reaction by the FDA resulted in the Great Cranberry
Scare of nineteen fifty nine. The chemical was found in
a few shipments of berries from Washington in Oregon, stage
(11:40):
which produced a tiny fraction of the annual crop. But
strictly reading the new Delaney clause and in an abundance
of caution, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur Fleming,
moved to limit the sale of berries from Washington and
Oregon until the industry could develop a plan to separate
out the contaminated berries. But the true damage came when
a reporter asked the Secretary whether a housewife should buy
(12:01):
cranberries for her family. Fleming answered that if a housewife
wasn't sure of the origin of the product, then to
be on the safe side, she doesn't buy. Suddenly, cranberries
were not safe, contaminated with a terrifying sounding a minute triazole,
despite the fact that only a tiny portion of the
crop and tested positive for the chemical. Grocery stores pulled
(12:22):
cranberries off of shelves, restaurants dropped them from their menus,
and some communities banned their sale. Like Magazine published a
list of alternative dishes, including spiced crab apples, frosted grapes,
currant jelly, and beach plum preserve. John Deccis, a cranberry
grower from Massachusetts, said on National Public Radio, we had
forty trailer loads of Cranberry's canceled within one hour after
(12:44):
that announcement. My reaction at the time was, oh my god,
it's over ocean spray. Cranberry Grower Cooperative tried to limit
the damage. The Executive Vice President's had a telegram to Fleming.
We demand that you take immediate steps to rectify the
inca cuble damages caused by your ill informed and ill
advised press statements yesterday. There were efforts by politicians as well.
(13:06):
Richard Nixon, then Vice president and campaigning for president, ate
four helpings of Cranberry's on November twelfth that made the
headline of the Washington Post the next day. He stood
proudly for the berry, saying, I, like other Americans expect
to eat traditional cranberries with my family on Thanksgiving Day.
Not to be outdone, the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kennedy
conspicuously drank two glasses of cranberry juice the next day.
(13:29):
The post then noted by partisan cranberry consumption on confirmed reports,
said Kennedy, quipping, if we both pass away, I feel
I shall have performed a great public service by taking
the Vice president with me. This was the first great
modern foods care in the nation. It was a time
of more powerful media, of a more educated public, of
(13:49):
more distrust of corporate motives. People were bombarded with contradictory
science in breathless news reports. The FDA tried to limit
the damage, creating a testing in the labeling program to
clear berries before Thanksgiving. But the death blow came Thanksgiving
Day when the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, served apple sauce instead.
The AP headline read no cranberries for President. The season
(14:14):
was a disaster. The cranberry industry reported twenty million dollars
in losses. In January, Ocean Spray announced it laid off
at third of its workforce. Sales were seventy percent below
normal for Thanksgiving and fifty percent below normal for Christmas.
The industry needed some ten million dollars in subsidies just
to survive the season. It was also unnecessary. In the end,
more than ninety nine percent of the crop was found
(14:36):
to be uncontaminated, and a few batches that were were
in minute amounts. Not one person is known to have
been harmed by the berries. There's really a mixed legacy
for the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine. It
did give rise to some consumer advocacy that achieved some
important reforms, but also, according to doctor Elizabeth Waylon or
the American Council's Science and Health, the nineteen fifty nine
(14:58):
cranberry Scare set the stage for day decades of completely
unnecessary anxiety about trace amounts of agricultural chemicals and additives
and food. The cranberry sales rebounded the following year, but
the industry learned a valuable lesson. One of the reasons
that the scare had been so devastating is that the
product was almost exclusively consumed in the short period of
(15:18):
the holidays, which made it extremely vulnerable to disruption. Cranbride
juice was produced and sold at the time, but it
was really actually formulated for the taste of growers, not
the general public, and it wasn't marketed by the industry.
But the industry started to create products like cranberry juice, cocktails,
and dried cranberries that make cranberry's popular year round and
(15:38):
therefore less vulnerable to disruption, and over time the industry
actually grew cranberry crop today some seven times what it
was in nineteen fifty nine. The industry stopped using a
mean it triazol altogether, but it's still used in non
agricultural settings like clearing grasses from highway medias. Over time,
the zerotolerance policy for carcinogens became unsustainable, partly because of
(16:00):
the cranberry scare. Testing methods improved, and as New Yorker
magazine noted, and the years that followed the cranberry Scare,
dozens and then hundreds of chemicals would prove carcinogenic in
humans or animals. Testing sensitivity increased a millionfold. Strict application
of the law, when researcher noted, undermine the ability of
the food and agricultural industries to produce almost any food
stuff that was free of some degree of contamination. More
(16:24):
flexible methods of assessing toxicity were needed, and the Delanny
clause was finally fully repealed in nineteen ninety two, but
definitive answers still elude us. Consumers are still caught between
advocates in industries, still faced with conflicting science, and still
confronted with what seems to be ever more common food scares.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
And a great job on the production as always by
Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the History Guy
for bringing us the nineteen fifty nine cranberry scare. And
it's typical of how regulations work and how overreaction in
the news. I mean, people love a good news story
and imagine the headline, and this is Eisenhower, right, This
(17:05):
guy led America through World War Two, but he wouldn't
eat cranberries. No cranberries for the President screamed the headlines
around the country and of course put an end to
the business of cranberry's essentially for that year. The story
of the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine, our
(17:26):
special Thanksgiving Day celebration continues here on our American Story
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
and all show long, we're celebrating Thanksgiving with stories of
all kinds. And our next story comes to us from
a man who is simply known as the History Guy.
His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people
of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy is also
heard here at Our American Stories. Four hundred million pounds
(00:34):
of cranberries are consumed by Americans each year. Twenty percent
of that is during the week of Thanksgiving. That's eighty
million pounds in a week, and five million gallons of
jelly cranberry sauce are consumed by Americans every holiday season
as well. Here's the History Guy to share the story
(00:55):
of the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
The history of US regulation of domestically produced food and
pharmaceuticals goes back to the end of the nineteenth century
and a pioneering researcher named Harvey Washington Wiley, who was
the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture's Division of Chemistry.
And from those early beginnings a regulatory environment developed in
fits and starts over time, as consumers in government and
(01:21):
industry tied to develop the best way to protect the
nation's food supply, and one of the first great tests
of that regulatory environment came in nineteen fifty nine, when
a new regulation went into a venerable product and resulted
in what has been described as the nation's first great
food scare. The Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine
(01:42):
changed the way Americans looked at their food, trusted their government,
and consumed their cranberries. Its history that deserves to be remembered.
Born in eighteen forty four, Harvey Wiley was a Civil
War veteran who had degrees in both medicine and chemistry.
He was offered the post of Chief Chemists for the
Department of Agriculture in eighteen eighty two, largely because of
(02:04):
his expertise in the chemistry of sugar, as the department
was interested in growing a US sugar industry based on sorgum.
In the position, Whiley started conducting research into the adulteration
and misbranding of food and drugs on the American market,
including so called poison squad studies, where the effects of
a diet consisting in part of the various preservatives were
tested on human volunteers. The studies and subsequent publications moved
(02:27):
the public, including a campaign where a million US women
wrote the White House and spread Congress to pass the
landmark consumer protection act called the Pure Food and Drug
Act of nineteen oh six, also called the Wiley Act.
For his contributions, Wyley was popularly called the Father of
the Pure Food and Drugs Act. While they Act gave
the Division of Chemistry some regulatory power, its ability to
(02:49):
enforce regulation was constantly challenged, and the ever present wrangling
between industry and regulation led to a nineteen twenty seven
reorganization of the Division of Chemistry into the Food Drug
an insecticide organization, which then in nineteen thirty was renamed
the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. A growing consumer movement,
(03:10):
pressured by macrating journalists and events such as the tragic
mass poisoning caused by the untested pharmaceutical elixir sulfon ilamide
that killed one hundred people in nineteen thirty seven, pressed
Congress to give the FDA significantly more robust powers with
the nineteen thirty eight Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
The Act has been omitted many times, and today is
(03:31):
the center of the Food and Drug Administrations, which today
has nearly fifteen thousand employees and a budget in excess
of five billion dollars regulatory power. One of the amendments
to the Act was driven by James Delaney, a US
Congressman from New York, who shared a select committee to
conduct an investigation and study the use of chemicals, pesticides,
and insecticides in and with respect to food products. The
(03:54):
results of his findings resulted in the nineteen fifty eight
Food Additives Amendment to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act
that was commonly called the Delaney Clause. It read, the
Secretary of the Food and Drug Administration shall not approve
for use in food any chemical additive found to induce
cancer in man, or after tests found to induce cancer
(04:15):
in animals. The reasoning behind the strict nature of the
Delady clause was stated by influential researcher doctor Wilhelm Huper,
who testified before Congress. I do not believe that one
can establish a safe dose of carcinogens, he said. I
do not think that we have the method or evidence
available but which we can reliably determine a safe dose.
(04:35):
The legislation was undoubtedly well intended, but it would lead
to some thorny questions, as we have found out that
essentially pretty much anything can give a rat cancer if
you give it to a man a large enough dose.
And one of the first tests of the amendment had
to do with the berry from a dwarf evergreen shrub
called Vaccinium macrocarpin, otherwise known as the North American cranberry.
(04:59):
Cranberries are ant, hard, sour, and bitter. The name is
likely derived from cranberry and is because part of the
flour of the shrub resembles the neck, head and bill
of a crane. There are many craneberry varieties in Europe
where the name was derived, but the North American berries
were introduced to colonists by narrogant peoples who had harvested
wild berries at least from the sixteenth century, perhaps much
(05:19):
farther back. The berries were often ground with dried meats
into pemicana, highly nutritious preserved food that was a significant
part of Native American cuisine. The berries were also used
for red dyes, and due to their astringent qualities in
medical poultices. Despite the sour taste, they were recognized fairly
early for their nutritional value, with a sixteen seventy two
book noting they're excellent against the scurvy, a quality derived
(05:42):
from their high vitamin sea content. The same text noted
their sour tastes and said that they were generally boiled
down with sugar to make a sauce for meat that
is a delicate sauce, especially with roasted mutton. To understand
how cranberry fit in with the Delaney claws, you have
to understand the unique nature of the fruit. Grow on
trailing vines like a strawberry, but the vines thrive on
(06:03):
a special combination of soils and water properties found in wetlands.
Cranberries grow in beds layered with sand, peaked and gravel
that are commonly called bogs. The bogs were originally formed
by receding glaciers, which carved impermeable kettle holes lined with clay.
The clay lightning prevented materials from leaching into the groundwater,
and as the glaciers melted, rocks and organic materials were
(06:24):
deposited on top of the clay, creating the ideal environment
for cranberries, which require acid, peat soil, an adequate fresh
water supply, and a growing season. It extends from April
to November. Wild cranberries of Massachusetts, for example, flour in June,
in July and are ready to pick by September. North
American cranberries were being exported to Europe by the seventeenth century,
(06:46):
and recipes for preserving the berries, as well as making sauces, tarts,
and pies were common in the eighteenth century in both
American and English cookbooks. Still, because of their unique nature,
cranberries were still being collected wild, not cultivated.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you're listening to the history guy telling the story
of the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine. When
we come back, more of the history guy here on
our American Story Folks, if you love the great American
(07:33):
stories we tell and love America like we do, we're
asking you to become a part of the Our American
Stories family. If you agree that America is a good
and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift
of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast becoming
a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American Stories
dot com now and go to the donate button and
(07:53):
help us keep the Great American Stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our American
Stories and the story of the Great Thanksgiving cranberry scare
(08:15):
of nineteen fifty nine. The History Guy brings us back
to where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
It wasn't until the early eighteen hundreds at Henry Hall,
a veteran of the Revolutionary War who lived in Dennis, Massachusetts,
started to cultivate the berries. Hall noticed that sand blown
in from nearby dunes helped vines grow faster. By adding
sand in appropriate quantities per acre, yields of berries increased.
Modern growers still spread an inch or two of sand
on their bogs every three years. As the berries grow
(08:45):
on vines, the vines do not need to be regularly replanted,
and some Massachusetts vines are reputed to be over one
hundred and fifty years old and still producing fruit. Hall's
innovations allowed greater production than a commercial industry grew. That,
combined with a greater availability of granite related sugar, allowed
the fruit to grow in popularity. As it did, it
grew in association with the holiday season. The berries were bright,
(09:08):
shiny red, making excellent decorations. They were harvested and it
available in winter, and as they are so to spoiled,
lasted well through the Christmas season. The season was also
known for feasts of roasted meat, which went well with
cranberry sauce. Cranberries became so popular that after the Civil War,
successful efforts to grow cranberries in New Jersey leather what
(09:29):
has been described as a cranberry fever, a rush of
investment to grow cranberries that was largely a bust, as
the plants are finicky and the people hoping to get
rich quick had little understanding of how to actually grow them.
Cultivation methods solely developed, including less time intensive methods of harvesting.
This was largely the result of careful study of growing
factors and methods in the finicky nature of the plant
(09:51):
meant that the industry developed growers organizations early on, which
worked not just to help develop growing methods, but to
collectively market the product. The success of a century of
effort really showed in nineteen fifty nine, when the industry
had already become a fifty million dollars a year business,
and nineteen fifty nine looked to be a bumper record
crop one hundred and twenty five million pounds. Growers were
(10:14):
expecting to make record profits, and likely they would have
except for the Delaney clause. The problem was an herbicide
called a minute triazole, a chlorophyll inhibitor. A minute triasol
was used by cranberry growers starting in the nineteen fifties
to eliminate sedges, rushes, horsetails, and deep rooted grasses from
(10:35):
the bogs clearing the water for the cranberries. Growers were
instructed to use the chemical only after the harvests so
as to keep it off the finished fruit, but trace
amounts could still exist in extremely small quantities. Manufacturers petitioned
the US Food and Drug Administration to allow small amounts
of residue, up to one part per million if necessary,
but the FDA rejected the petition. There was a problem.
(10:58):
New research had suggested that large, long term doses of
the chemical suppressed thybroid function in rats, encouraging tumors possibly
cancerous to form. That made a minute triazole a carcinogen.
And while the study suggested that a rat would have
to eat a vast quantity of contaminated cranberries over its
entire life span to increase its risk for cancer. The
(11:19):
Delaney clause said that carcinogens were not acceptable in any amount.
When trace amounts of the chemical were found in a
part of the cranberry crop just seventeen days before Thanksgiving,
the reaction by the FDA resulted in the Great Cranberry
Scare of nineteen fifty nine. The chemical was found in
a few shipments of berries from Washington in Oregon, stage
(11:40):
which produced a tiny fraction of the annual crop. But
strictly reading the new Delaney clause and in an abundance
of caution, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur Fleming,
moved to limit the sale of berries from Washington and
Oregon until the industry could develop a plan to separate
out the contaminated berries. But the true damage came when
a reporter asked the Secretary whether a housewife should buy
(12:01):
cranberries for her family. Fleming answered that if a housewife
wasn't sure of the origin of the product, then to
be on the safe side, she doesn't buy. Suddenly, cranberries
were not safe, contaminated with a terrifying sounding a minute triazole,
despite the fact that only a tiny portion of the
crop and tested positive for the chemical. Grocery stores pulled
(12:22):
cranberries off of shelves, restaurants dropped them from their menus,
and some communities banned their sale. Like Magazine published a
list of alternative dishes, including spiced crab apples, frosted grapes,
currant jelly, and beach plum preserve. John Deccis, a cranberry
grower from Massachusetts, said on National Public Radio, we had
forty trailer loads of Cranberry's canceled within one hour after
(12:44):
that announcement. My reaction at the time was, oh my god,
it's over ocean spray. Cranberry Grower Cooperative tried to limit
the damage. The Executive Vice President's had a telegram to Fleming.
We demand that you take immediate steps to rectify the
inca cuble damages caused by your ill informed and ill
advised press statements yesterday. There were efforts by politicians as well.
(13:06):
Richard Nixon, then Vice president and campaigning for president, ate
four helpings of Cranberry's on November twelfth that made the
headline of the Washington Post the next day. He stood
proudly for the berry, saying, I, like other Americans expect
to eat traditional cranberries with my family on Thanksgiving Day.
Not to be outdone, the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kennedy
conspicuously drank two glasses of cranberry juice the next day.
(13:29):
The post then noted by partisan cranberry consumption on confirmed reports,
said Kennedy, quipping, if we both pass away, I feel
I shall have performed a great public service by taking
the Vice president with me. This was the first great
modern foods care in the nation. It was a time
of more powerful media, of a more educated public, of
(13:49):
more distrust of corporate motives. People were bombarded with contradictory
science in breathless news reports. The FDA tried to limit
the damage, creating a testing in the labeling program to
clear berries before Thanksgiving. But the death blow came Thanksgiving
Day when the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, served apple sauce instead.
The AP headline read no cranberries for President. The season
(14:14):
was a disaster. The cranberry industry reported twenty million dollars
in losses. In January, Ocean Spray announced it laid off
at third of its workforce. Sales were seventy percent below
normal for Thanksgiving and fifty percent below normal for Christmas.
The industry needed some ten million dollars in subsidies just
to survive the season. It was also unnecessary. In the end,
more than ninety nine percent of the crop was found
(14:36):
to be uncontaminated, and a few batches that were were
in minute amounts. Not one person is known to have
been harmed by the berries. There's really a mixed legacy
for the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine. It
did give rise to some consumer advocacy that achieved some
important reforms, but also, according to doctor Elizabeth Waylon or
the American Council's Science and Health, the nineteen fifty nine
(14:58):
cranberry Scare set the stage for day decades of completely
unnecessary anxiety about trace amounts of agricultural chemicals and additives
and food. The cranberry sales rebounded the following year, but
the industry learned a valuable lesson. One of the reasons
that the scare had been so devastating is that the
product was almost exclusively consumed in the short period of
(15:18):
the holidays, which made it extremely vulnerable to disruption. Cranbride
juice was produced and sold at the time, but it
was really actually formulated for the taste of growers, not
the general public, and it wasn't marketed by the industry.
But the industry started to create products like cranberry juice, cocktails,
and dried cranberries that make cranberry's popular year round and
(15:38):
therefore less vulnerable to disruption, and over time the industry
actually grew cranberry crop today some seven times what it
was in nineteen fifty nine. The industry stopped using a
mean it triazol altogether, but it's still used in non
agricultural settings like clearing grasses from highway medias. Over time,
the zerotolerance policy for carcinogens became unsustainable, partly because of
(16:00):
the cranberry scare. Testing methods improved, and as New Yorker
magazine noted, and the years that followed the cranberry Scare,
dozens and then hundreds of chemicals would prove carcinogenic in
humans or animals. Testing sensitivity increased a millionfold. Strict application
of the law, when researcher noted, undermine the ability of
the food and agricultural industries to produce almost any food
stuff that was free of some degree of contamination. More
(16:24):
flexible methods of assessing toxicity were needed, and the Delanny
clause was finally fully repealed in nineteen ninety two, but
definitive answers still elude us. Consumers are still caught between
advocates in industries, still faced with conflicting science, and still
confronted with what seems to be ever more common food scares.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
And a great job on the production as always by
Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the History Guy
for bringing us the nineteen fifty nine cranberry scare. And
it's typical of how regulations work and how overreaction in
the news. I mean, people love a good news story
and imagine the headline, and this is Eisenhower, right, This
(17:05):
guy led America through World War Two, but he wouldn't
eat cranberries. No cranberries for the President screamed the headlines
around the country and of course put an end to
the business of cranberry's essentially for that year. The story
of the Great Cranberry Scare of nineteen fifty nine, our
(17:26):
special Thanksgiving Day celebration continues here on our American Story
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