Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s hoping you have a lot for which to be thankful, and that you have some great food to share with family and/or friends.
One of the most traditional side dishes at an American Thanksgiving dinner is cranberry sauce.
But not in 1959.
That was the year of what History.com called the Great Cranberry Scare.
The story starts the previous year, when an amendment to the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act took effect.
It said that the government could not declare a food additive safe “if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal.”
In keeping with that law, federal officials announced in November 1959 – weeks before Thanksgiving – that testing had found that cranberries grown in several states had been exposed to a weed killer that had been linked to tumors in rats.
They advised that producers pull their berries off the market until they could set up a way to test cranberries across the country.
These officials did not say cranberries themselves were dangerous, nor that there was contamination all over the country.
They even cleared millions of pounds of cranberries, saying those were safe to eat.
But many stores and restaurants decided to err on the side of caution and just pull cranberries altogether.
President and Mrs. Eisenhower decided to swap out cranberries for applesauce at their Thanksgiving dinner.
All of this was a disaster for cranberry growers, who were hoping for a Thanksgiving windfall and instead saw sales fall by half and then some.
They would eventually get millions of dollars in federal relief payments, but before that, they got some PR help from two men who would be presidential nominees in 1960. .
Days after the federal cranberry advisory, both Massachusetts US Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon came to Wisconsin, a cranberry powerhouse.
Kennedy pointedly drank two glasses of cranberry juice while he was there.
Nixon ate four servings of cranberries and proclaimed his faith in the safety of American cranberries… though it turned out later that the ones he’d eaten that night had actually come into contact with the weed killer that had started the scare in the first place.
Some of the highlights of the big Thanksgiving Day parade in New York are the giant balloons.
Years ago, the tradition at the end of the parade was to let those balloons fly free, so that people could enjoy the spectacle of seeing them float back down to earth and deflate.
Except that several times those balloons managed to get themselves caught on the wings of passing airplanes and nearly causing disasters.
How the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 Set Off a Thanksgiving Panic (History.com)
FREE-FLOATING NYC THANKSGIVING PARADE BALLOONS CAUSED MAYHEM (Untapped New York)
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