The Cranberry Boggle

"Why," asked New England Missionary John Eliot in 1647, "are Strawberries sweet and Cranberries sowre?" The reason in those days was that cranberries needed sugar. But progress took care of that, and the cranberry has since nourished into a $45 million-a-year business, graced Thanksgiving tables in sauces and jellies, and even--when its juice is mixed with gin--in a concoction called swampfire. But mixed with Arthur S. (for Sherwood) Flemming, U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the cranberry last week turned out to be something more powerful: pandemonium.

Said Secretary Flemming at a press conference specially called just 17 days before Thanksgiving: two batches of the cranberry crop from Washington and Oregon had been found contaminated from improper use of a toxic weed killer called aminotriazole. The chemical, he said, had been tested on rats and had caused thyroid cancer. And so consumers should avoid buying Washington and Oregon cranberries until a way is found to separate the good berries from the bad. In fact, said Flemming, housewives should be "on the safe side" and not buy any, unless they could be sure that the berries were not tainted. As his advice hit the headlines, housewives, supermarkets and restaurants swept cranberries off their shelves, shopping lists and menus.

No Tolerance. "This is a disaster," cried George Olsson, president of Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., a cooperative for 1,079 growers who produce 75% of the nation's 62,000-ton cranberry production. Cranberrymen, he said, have used aminotriazole with care--even before the Agriculture Department set a rule requiring that bogs could be sprayed only after harvest, to prevent contamination of berries. (In 1957 Ocean Spray took more than 3,000,000 lbs. of a suspect crop off the market.)

Secretary Flemming had acted on the strength of a Food and Drug Administration (part of his HEW department) ruling that allows no tolerance of aminotriazole. Yet even the experts proved to be divided on whether the feeding of aminotriazole caused cancer in rats, and there was no evidence that it would produce cancer in humans. And anyway, by the standards used on the rats, a human would have to stuff down about 15,000 lbs. of cranberries a day over the years to get the same symptoms. Said Dr. Chester E. Cross, director of the University of Massachusetts Cranberry Station: he would as soon eat a helping of tainted cranberries as smoke a cigarette.

No Hope. The cranberry farmers dismally predicted that Flemming's feverish warning had crippled the industry for years to come. They were convinced that no matter how many lots of berries might be cleared for the coming holidays, edgy housewives would still refuse to buy them.

Neither were they cheered by the fact that Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson, who has enough trouble with the farmers, performed a kind of ritual sacrifice by gulping down a bowl of cranberries in public to show that he was behind the industry. In Wisconsin, Presidential Hopeful Jack Kennedy loyally tossed off a couple of glasses of cranberry juice, and Vice President Nixon cheerfully ate four helpings of sauce. (Afterward, agents seized a tainted Wisconsin batch.)

Despite these feats of leadership, the farmers feared the worst. It looked as if Thanksgiving would be cranberryless for thousands--except laboratory rats. And they, like the growers, had little to be thankful for.

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