Happy Cranberry Day!
The unwitting cause of the whole sorry incident was Long Island Congressman James J. Delaney (D-NY), who added a clause to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1958 barring any additive in food shown to cause cancer in humans or lab animals. In early November, Arthur S. Fleming, Secretary of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, issued a warning to consumers that traces of the weed killer aminotriazole had been found in Oregon and Washington State. He urged Americans to “be on the safe side” and avoid consuming cranberries until the crop had been tested and deemed safe.
Given the time required to carry out such testing, Fleming all but guaranteed that the sale of cranberry products for 1959 would crash to historic lows. Fleming was motivated to make this announcement by his reading (incorrect, as it turned out) of the Delaney Clause of the 1958 Act since only a minuscule amount of the pesticide was found in only a tiny fraction of the national crop—and only in parts of Oregon and Washington. Cranberry growers nationwide, nearly all of them small family farmers, lost millions of dollars.
The Great Cranberry Scare lasted only one season and the industry, with nearly $10 million in compensation payments from Congress to make amends for the government's mishandling of the incident, saw sales rise to normal levels the next year. But the fear in the general public over carcinogens and other harmful chemicals in the food supply would never go away. Indeed, they would only grow in the coming decades with the publication of Rachel Carson's famous book, Silent Spring (1962), the founding of numerous environmental, public health, and consumer protection organizations, and occasional scares like that in 1989 over Alar in apples.
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