In the Loops

With all the talk about Red Dye in your Froot Loops being bad for you (why not talk about the nutritive value of Froot Loops to begin with?), I thought I'd take you back to 1959, when all of our Thanksgivings were wrecked because of Aminotriazole.

Aminotriazole, as it turned out, was not your father's inelegant second cousin twice removed from Philadelphia (and soon to be removed from Baltimore as well.) No, that's the name of an herbicide which had been applied to a certain amount of the cranberry crop from the Pacific Northwest that year, and several weeks before Thanksgiving that year,  Arthur S. Flemming, US Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, had announced that some of the cranberries harvested in  the Pacific Northwest had tested positive for it. The herbicide was known to cause abnormal growths in lab rats.

Ocean Spray, then as now the big name in the cranberry business, claimed that a person would “have to consume carloads” of cranberries to suffer any illness, but Flemming, ever cautious as a good Secretary of Health would be, told berry gobblers not to buy berries, jellies and whatnot if they couldn't determine the origin. That meant a lot of families had to do without the cranberry sauce that year.

 You might not believe it, but in those days, people took health warnings seriously, and by December '59, the industry trade paper "Cranberries" (longtime subscriber here) said that the sales of fresh cranberries were down 63%, with sales of canned jellies down 79%. I love how the jelly plops out of the can with little Van Allen belts dented into it.

This was, at the time, a fifty-million (that's a lot of meeyuns today) dollar per year business, knocked out by a bug spray. And Ocean Spray market researchers found that almost half of those who abstained from cranberry products that winter said they were swearing off the tart red berries for life.

Which brings up a side point: this past week alone, I have seen people vowing not to watch anything ever again on CBS because they dropped "The Equalizer," and a good number of folks saying they will never watch the Baltimore Ravens again because they cut their kicker, a man with charges of sexual misconduct swirling around him.

Say it with me now: Oh well now I mean really!

The 'berry brouhaha was over almost by the time panic shook the nation. Shortly before Christmas '59, the government realized it might have acted a bit hastily and released ton upon ton of berries for dinner. 

In retrospect, we know now that the government inspectors insisted that no product be allowed on the shelves if it was found to induce cancer in man or animal. 

Listed among products already suspected of being carcinogens (cancer-causers) were radiation, and tobacco smoke, both of which are still around. So is cranberry juice and jelly, but it had to go through a lot to get back on the market so that your father's inelegant second cousin could hoove on a Lucky Strike while passing the Ocean Spray Cranberry Jelly to you.