There’s Definitely Something In It
Adam Winograd
The modern American cranberry scourges our nation. Hard, bitter, spreads like leukemia. Our government refuses to act; the FDA proves a toothless foe. Cranberry propaganda sits comfortably on our tongues; we regularly elide its astringency. One man in history fought the cranberry menace: Arthur Sherwood Flemming. He received two Presidential Medals of Freedom, and died of renal failure. No, drinking cranberry juice could not have healed his kidneys. This is a pernicious myth. History is written by the victors.
Cranberry production booms in the twentieth century. Thousands of acres are leveled for “cultivation.” Farmhands wade through brackish maroon, brazenly despoiling the land. Upstart farming conglomerates churn out these tart little ball bearings faster than we can construct marshy flotillas to block them. An army of PR-men market the tumorous berries as not only edible, but sweet. The shadowy cabal known as Ocean Spray composes itself out of the earth like a golem. Corporate attorneys devise loopholes for agro-business, propping up the cranberry monopoly. Not even the dust bowl impedes the coast-hugging crop.
Enter our hero, Arthur S. Flemming. As Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, he learns an unknown quantity of cranberries are contaminated with aminotriazole, a pesticide ballooning the thyroid of rats. Flemming stands before God and country, seventeen days before Thanksgiving, and advises housewives not to buy cranberry sauce. The day of the announcement is dubbed “Black Monday.”
Lobby-rich politicians scramble to dispel panic, promising cranberry sauce will remain on their holiday spreads; President Eisenhower famously omits the dish from his table. Flemming receives death threats. The following year, Nixon publicly eats raw cranberries on the campaign trail. Kennedy sips two cranberry juice cocktails that same day. It has no effect. The cranberry market collapses, bleeding millions of dollars. Ocean Spray argues only consuming “carloads” of cranberries would trigger an adverse reaction, but quickly switches gears, demanding aminotriazole be phased out of use.
Then, tragedy: Edward Gelsthorpe marches into Ocean Spray’s marketing department and pitches cranapple juice. “Mix sweet and sour – nobody will know the difference,” he asserts in a widely circulated memo. By the time Kennedy is shot, cranapple juice flies off the shelves faster than grocers can restock it. The FDA quietly certifies the product is “generally recognized as safe.” Its popularity continues to this day. Ocean Spray’s value currently exceeds two billion dollars, and execs deify “Cranapple Ed” for reversing the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.
The official slogan for cranberry juice: “There’s definitely something in it.”
If you scour the web, as we have, seeking the fraught account of the cranberry, you will find all traces of truth scrubbed away. Check FDA.gov for information about aminotriazole, revised food statutes, lists of benefactors—nothing. Relevant articles are “archived” behind exorbitant online paywalls; even after shilling out for access we are greeted by a winking-shrugging “page does not exist.” Now we meet in secret, plotting mass floods of the bogs, targeting enablers, cultivating antibodies, disseminating the samizdat. We eat pears.
Adam Winograd is a writer and educator based in the Boston area. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in 2021. He loves to write movie and book reviews, cook delicious food, play piano, and dance wildly. In addition to flash fiction, Adam is currently working on his first novel.