In 1959, a nationwide food panic erupted over a treasured Thanksgiving dish. Two weeks before the holiday, the federal government announced that cranberries had been contaminated by a cancer-causing chemical. Cranberry sales plummeted, schools tossed out cranberry products, restaurants eliminated the suspect fruit from menus. The White House even took a stance, serving applesauce in lieu of cranberries at Thanksgiving dinner.
The fear was overinflated: A person would have had to eat several thousand pounds of cranberries a day—for several years—to actually get cancer. While some feared cranberry sales would never recover, the industry rebounded from what became known as the “the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.” Today, the United States is consistently the world’s top producer of cranberries, and the
