Cranberry Bog

With Thanksgiving just weeks away, Arthur Flemming last Monday gave cranberry growers the short end of the wishbone. Experimenting with "aminotriazole," a weed-killing chemical that some Pacific Northwest growers use in their bogs, government chemists had produced cancer in the thyroid gland of a mouse. "Just to be on the safe side," Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, advised America's housewives not to buy any cranberries until extensive testing had been completed.

Even though the bulk of the crop--from Massachusetts, New Jersey and Michigan--was uncontaminated, major supermarket chains took cranberries off the grocery shelves. With a record crop of 125 million pounds to sell, the indignant industry called Flemming's action "unnecessary, untimely and imprudent." The Secretary had embarked, said the growers' spokesman, "on a cranberry witchhunt."

Later, a toxicologist for American Cyanamid, which markets the controversial weed-killer, stated that a person "would have to consume 15,000 pounds of contaminated cranberries a day for many years" to sustain ill effects. Belatedly, Flemming's Department dispatched a hundred chemists to separate the good cranberries from the bad.

More is at stake, however, than sauce for the turkey. When aminotriazole was introduced in 1957, the Agriculture Department and Flemming's Pure Foods and Drugs Administration failed to cooperate in their evaluation of the new chemical's safety. With the increasing use of such chemicals in the growth and preparation of foods, more thorough and prompt controls are essential in order to prevent such costly and inexcusable mistakes as the Cranberry Affair.