On Nov. 9, 1959, at the instruction of Arthur S. Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole.

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. Cranberries cleared for sale during the crisis were the only FDA product ever to boast correctly of being tested and cleared “by FDA.”

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.