The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959

A worker stacks cranberries during America’s first food scare, in 1959.PHOTOGRAPH BY TED RUSSELL / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY

On November 26, 1959, Mamie Eisenhower served applesauce with dinner. Although the First Lady might have preferred not to make headlines with her choice of stewed fruit, the actor Rosalind Russell, a guest at the White House that evening, disclosed the menu to the national media. America had been waiting with more than usual interest to see what the Eisenhowers would eat as Thanksgiving relish. The news came Friday, courtesy of the Associated Press: “No Cranberries for President.”

Ike’s table reflected the nation’s. The problem wasn’t the berries, which remained palatable under the usual mountain of sugar; it was the aminotriazole. On November 9th, Arthur S. Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, had informed the public that a small portion of the cranberry crop from the Pacific Northwest had recently tested positive for the herbicide, which caused abnormal growths in lab rats. Ocean Spray, the dominant growers’ coöperative, argued that a person would “have to consume carloads” of cranberries to trigger any possible ill effect. Nevertheless, Flemming had a message for the consumer (that is, the “housewife”): if she couldn’t determine the origin of her berries, “to be on the safe side, she doesn’t buy.”

A fifty-million-dollar-a-year business collapsed overnight. In December, 1959, the industry trade paper, Cranberries, reported that mid-November sales of fresh cranberries had dropped sixty-three per cent from the year before; canned sales were down seventy-nine per cent. Ocean Spray’s market researchers found that almost half the abstaining shoppers intended never to buy cranberries again. For his efforts, Flemming was hanged in effigy by Miss Cranberry of Modesto, California, who wore a long berry garland and, for reasons less clear, fishnet stockings.

Vaccinium macrocarpon, the North American cranberry, may seem an unlikely villain of the chemical age. Early on, American Indians blended wild cranberries with tallow and venison to form a kind of pemmican. Later, Henry Hall, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, drained and fenced a marsh on Cape Cod and cultivated the first recorded crop. Over time, cranberry growers tamed the bog: in the mid-nineteen-fifties, they began using aminotriazole, a chlorophyll inhibitor, to eliminate sedges, rushes, horsetails, and deep-rooted grasses. (Sprayed by plane over cattail swamps, it also cleared the water for geese, which were not yet considered a weed on wings.) Labels and growers’ compacts stated that the chemical should be used only in the week after the November harvest, to keep it off the finished fruit. But its manufacturers petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to allow small amounts of residue—up to one part per million—if necessary. In June, 1959, five months before Thanksgiving, the F.D.A. rejected the second of those tolerance applications. New research had suggested that large, long-term doses of the chemical suppressed thyroid function in rats, encouraging tumors (possibly cancerous) to form.

The legal basis for the decision came from a late addition to the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, a piece of consumer-safety legislation. The so-called Delaney Clause—named for James J. Delaney, a Democratic congressman from Queens, New York—imposed a rigid restriction: “No additive shall be deemed to be safe if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal.” At the time, researchers had documented four such contaminants: soot, radiation, tobacco smoke, and beta-naphthyalamine (a dye chemical). In 1957, the journal Science had published research on the clear link between smoking and cancer. Just a few years earlier, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission had begun to study the effects of ionizing radiation on the survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Testifying in favor of the Delaney Clause, Wilhelm Hueper, an influential cancer researcher, advocated “precaution” in the face of incomplete knowledge. “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 by which we can reliably determine a safe dose.” In Rumsfeldian terms, the threat was an unknown unknown.

In the end, a few bad berries spoiled the barrel. Maybe the plants had been sprayed at the wrong time. Once the tainted samples appeared, in 1959, under a new testing protocol, Flemming believed that his office was compelled to act. With Ocean Spray’s grudging consent, government inspectors started to seize barrels as if they were filled with moonshine. Still, some people stayed on the sauce. During a Presidential campaign swing through Wisconsin, Richard Nixon tucked into four helpings of cranberries. (Fruit from the same twenty-ton batch, the papers later reported, tested positive for contamination.) Not to be outdone, his opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy, downed two cranberry-juice cocktails the very same day. After toasting the politicians for their “braver stomachs,” Life magazine published a holiday photo spread of all-American fruits that could fill the cranberry gap. Were cooks ready to give thanks with side dishes like spiced crabapples, frosted grapes, currant jelly, and beach-plum preserve? No? How about pickled watermelon rind?

If Flemming was the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving (that character débuted in 1957), he also gave back the berries. In the days before the holiday, his department struck an agreement with the industry and released the cranberry lots that had tested clean. At Christmastime, this represented more than ninety-nine per cent of the impounded fruit. Over the winter and spring, the government created a ten-million-dollar fund to compensate cranberry farmers. The market began to recover the next fall.

Nowadays we treat dietary panics as a national pastime. But the cranberry crisis created the rules of the game: the daily media commotion, the confusing science, the industry resentment, the political grandstanding. It taught Americans a new way to fear our food. In short, it is the kind of historical footnote that you could turn into a dissertation, which is what Mark Ryan Janzen did, in 2010, under the title “The Cranberry Scare of 1959: The Beginning of the End of the Delaney Clause.” In one passage—a sort of footnote to the footnote—Janzen records the impressions of a marine biologist who attended the November 18th negotiations between Flemming and Big Cranberry. Three years later, that observer, Rachel Carson, published “Silent Spring,” her indictment of the pesticide DDT, which laid out a framework for the environmental movement.

Janzen goes on to explain that the no-threshold policy toward carcinogens could not be sustained. (Congress finally killed the Delaney Clause, in 1996.) In 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. Now the public had a lot more to fear—cyclamate sweeteners, nitrites in meats, red dye No. 2, saccharine, Alar on apples, benzene in Perrier.

That menagerie of bugbears, by the way, comes from a report by the American Council on Science and Health, a self-described free-market advocacy group. The lesson that crowd seems to take from the cranberry scare—it’s first on its list—is that we are easily fooled by quack scientists and hack reporters. But then what about those nitrites? Last month, a World Health Organization working group concluded that eating small amounts of processed meat significantly increases the risk of developing colorectal cancer. Processing, the researchers elaborated, includes salting. Now it would appear that brining the Thanksgiving turkey will give you cancer. Caveat comestor.