Ocean Spray is the world’s leading supplier of cranberry-related products, controlling 75% of cranberry farms in the US and Canada since 1930. This includes their cranberry juice, fresh cranberries, craisins (which were created as an Ocean-Spray marketing ploy, by the way), cranberry sauce, and a whole smattering of other products. Ocean Spray sells 20% of their fresh cranberries during the week leading up to Thanksgiving—a whopping 80 million pounds of them. [...]
Cranberries are grown in bogs primarily in the northern part of the US in soft, marshy ground with acid-peat soil. They’re hard to harvest on the vines they grow on, so instead, the bogs are flooded at harvest time, water reels pull them off the vine, and the cranberries float to the top, allowing them to be collected and sent off to market. Those images you see of farmers in waders, up to their chests in water with cranberries floating all around them? Totally accurate. [...]
President Eisenhower did not eat cranberries for Thanksgiving that year, and neither did the majority of the country. In a single year, cranberry sales dropped by nearly 70% (pdf). According to the American Council on Science and Health, the great cranberry scare of 1959 set off the very first carcinogen panic in the United States. This scare was mostly overblown and overhyped: The lab rats would have had to consume truckloads of cranberries treated with aminotriazole before getting any tumor growths. Still, the negative publicity had a direct effect on sales, which should have been enough of an incentive to have Ocean Spray rethink their methods. It wasn’t. [...]
It would make sense for cranberry farms to be held to some US government oversight, such as the Clean Water Act, but due to a confusing loophole, they aren’t. Agricultural run-off from places like cranberry bogs and rice fields is not regulated, and Ocean Spray takes full advantage of that ambiguity. In Wisconsin, for example, cranberry bogs have destroyed more wetlands than all other uses combined, and the evidence is mounting that continuing non-organic farming of cranberries will continue to be an immense environmental hazard.
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