The Cranberry Scare of 1959 and Other Family Stories

It's been a long time since all five John siblings have gathered around a holiday table. But wherever they are this time of year, you can be sure that someone will share the story of the Cranberry Scare of 1959. 

This cautionary tale, which made headlines in November and December 1959, is retold year after year by the eldest John, my brother-in-law Steven. As the oldest, he has the clearest memories of the Cranberry Scare.  Each Thanksgiving that we spend together, he shares the story with a combination of horror and glee--the way that many of the best stories are told, if not at Thanksgiving then at least at Halloween.   Steve's timing, another important storytelling skill, is impeccable. Steven begins the tale just after the turkey is carved and slices are distributed, and  just before we pass the gravy and cranberry sauce. We pause and laugh nervously, but those who want cranberry sauce with their turkey then proceed (at their own risk) to spoon it out.

Maybe you and your family have not heard about the Cranberry Scare of 1959. 

So, let me tell you what happened as reported by the New Yorker magazine:

On November 9th 1959, Arthur S. Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, told America that a small portion of the cranberry crop from the Pacific Northwest had tested positive for aminotriazole--a powerful herbicide used in the cranberry bogs. What's more, aminotriazole had been linked to abnormal growths in lab rats. Ocean Spray, the nation's leading cranberry grower, argued that a person would “have to consume carloads” of cranberries to trigger ill effects. Still, Flemming warned America's housewives, that if they could not determine the origin of their berries, "be safe...  and don't buy.”

This Thanksgiving 1959 ad from the Saturday Evening Post showed cranberries on the holiday table, even though ,after the scare, the Coca Cola company wanted the possible danger removed. Unfortunately, in those days there was no digital remastering, and it was too late to delete the offending fruit.

There were no cranberries served at the John family Thanksgiving in 1959.  My husband George was just a year old at the time, and does not recall the omission, but apparently others do.

Here is the national significance:
The Cranberry Scare of 1959 was the first food scare in the United States involving food additives. Well before gluten, MSG, and genetic modification, the cranberry scare had Americans wondering what was being added to their foods. It started a trend known by some today as "conscious consumerism" and that others call "fear of food."
As for the national cranberry market, a fifty-million-dollar-a-year business collapsed overnight, said the New Yorker.  And in December, 1959, the industry trade paper, Cranberries, reported that mid-November sales of fresh cranberries had dropped sixty-three per cent from the year before; canned sales were down seventy-nine per cent. Ocean Spray’s market researchers found that almost half the abstaining shoppers intended never to buy cranberries again. It took three years for the cranberry industry to recover, aided by a government subsidy program. 

In his 2010 dissertation on the cranberry scare written at Texas A&M University, researcher Mark Ryan Janzen reports that short term effects of the panic extended until 1962, when price per barrel returned to pre-1959 levels. Janzen also describes the media's role in creating the panic, as well as (then) Massachusetts Senator John F Kennedy's attempts to revive the industry in his home state--even going so far as to be photographed consuming large amounts of cranberries.



Here is the significance to the John family:

None of us who entered the John family either by blood or by marriage, can look a cranberry in the eye--especially at Thanksgiving time. Many of us feel compelled to share the tale of the cranberry scare with the friends and families we now share Thanksgiving with. If we are hosting Thanksgiving and are thus compelled to make cranberry sauce, some of us eschew Ocean Spray and get into discussions with the Whole Foods produce people about the origin and quality of the cranberries they sell. What bogs did they come from and were they grown in cages?

And here's what it all means for you and your family:

Maybe you won't discuss the cranberry scare with your friends and family around the Thanksgiving table. But one of your elders might relate a cautionary tale, and it might be one that you have heard before, in fact, many, many times before. If your family has been in this country for a while, it might be the story of how your relative John Howland fell off of the Mayflower during a storm and had to be rescued with a boat hook. If your family had a lot of stoners, it might be a story about how the cat inhaled your smoke fumes, got stoned,  and fell (not jumped, but fell--this is how the story is told) off the top shelf of a bookcase. The cat lived. 
I guess that if the cat had died, the tale would be more cautionary.

So why do we really share these stories? 
Research shows that there is an evolutionary advantage.
We know that other mammals like whales and dolphins make sounds to communicate danger.
And that's what our stories can do.
Consider the life lessons that we have already covered, such as:
Think before you eat!
Don't lean to far over a ship railing in a storm!
Keep an eye on what the FDA is doing before you buy stock in a pharmaceutical startup--or cranberries.

Listen up and you will have a better life.
And if you pay close enough attention....you will not be doomed to repeat the mistakes of your ancestors.

My brother-in-law Steven would have been around twelve at the time of the scare--certainly an impressionable age at which to be told that along with ducking and covering to protect yourself from at Russian nuclear attack, a cranberry could kill you.

Vigilance was required!

"Storytelling could be an evolutionary mechanism that helped keep our ancestors alive."

The fastest way to get to San Francisco on a Friday Night is to take 280. You want to avoid the 101 at all costs.

It is kismet that just this morning  I learned about "survival through storytelling" from a student who came into the  Menlo College Writing Center. She arrived with a writing prompt for an essay on narrative nonfiction prepared by her professor, Caroline Caspar. The prompt began with several quotes, like the one above, from the 2014 Atlantic Magazine article, The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling.

In this article, Paris-based writer and historian Cody C. Delistraty, says,

"If I tell you a story about how to survive, you’ll be more likely to actually survive than if I just give you facts. For instance, if I were to say, “There’s an animal near that tree, so don’t go over there,” it would not be as effective as if I were to tell you, “My cousin was eaten by a malicious, scary creature that lurks around that tree, so don’t go over there.” 

This, of course, reminds me of the time I was visiting a well known San Francisco art collector in her Russian Hill home. She pointed to a stone sculpture and said, "this was created by the tribe that ate Michael Rockefeller!"

Granted this has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, although I imagine she might have mentioned it to visiting friends and family at holiday time. I, for one, have never forgotten it--although I am not sure that I will ever find myself art collecting in New Guinea.

Getting back to the Atlantic article, Delistraty observes, "a narrative works off of both data and emotions, which is significantly more effective in engaging a listener than data alone."

 In fact, Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that people remember information when it is weaved into narratives “up to 22 times more than facts alone.”

The Pueblo Indians have preserved their culture and traditions through oral storytelling. Here is a storyteller figurine of a woman surrounded by children.

Do you have a story to share this Thanksgiving? 
Does it involve survival? 
Maybe your story will teach us how to live a better life. 
Maybe there's no point to your story at all, but sharing it will be good for your  individual evolution. 
If you are so inclined, write to me and share your story here on my blog, ensuring that all of us receive an evolutionary advantage.

Happy Thanksgiving!

From Generation to Generation: A Conversation With Lillian John

Lillian John at a family wedding earlier this year.

Lillian John, 20, is the youngest of my seven nieces and nephews. Her dad, Nick John, is my husband's brother. Her mom, Grace John, was born in Taiwan. Lillian is now a sophomore at the University of San Francisco--a Jesuit college. She is majoring in finance, but was required to take a theology course. She chose a class called Jews, Judaism and Jewish Identity taught by Dr. Oren Kroll-Zeldin.             
Lillian told me that she chose the course based on three things: 
1)the fine reputation of the teacher, 2)a good friend was taking the class with her and 3)if she got stuck, Aunt Lauren could help her out. As part of her class, she attended services at  San Franciso's Congregation Emanu-El, established in 1850 and Congregation Sherith Israel established in 1851. Another assignment was to interview a Jewish person about how the Holocaust and knowledge of the Holocaust affected their view of the world. We spoke at length by phone on Sunday night.  


When our phone call ended, I put down my i-phone and whispered "L’dor vador". It’s a phrase that's often recited in Jewish prayer which means from generation to generation and refers to continuity, and the responsibility of passing on faith, prayer and cultural traditions from generation to generation.


Thank you Lillian for blessing me with that opportunity.
And thank you to my grandparents and great grandparents who had the foresight to come to America in the early 20th century--literally enabling my life to be possible.

Here is Lillian's report:

I interviewed my aunt, Lauren. My aunt is sixty years old and she is an Ashkenazi Jew.  She was born in Queens and now lives in Menlo Park. Lauren is in an interfaith marriage with my Uncle George who is Catholic. Lauren calls herself an observant Jew because she attends Shabbat and keeps the holidays. However, she does not practice Halakah nor is she Kosher. In June, she is going to have her Bat Mitzvah at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. She is working very hard learning and practicing her Hebrew.

Congregation Beth Am 

When did you first learn or hear about the Holocaust? How did it make you feel?

The first time Lauren heard about the Holocaust was when she was ten years old. She saw a numbers tattooed on one of her neighbors’ arms. There were a lot of Jews who survived the Holocaust in her neighborhood and many of them had tattoos. She asked her mother what the tattoos meant and, her mother told her that the neighbors were in a prison camp in Europe. Her mother did not tell her the horrors of the Holocaust or what happened in the camps. Lauren had to read “The Diary of Anne Frank” for school but, she still did not know what happened in camps because the diary ends when the family is captured. When she was 11 or 12 she went to Amsterdam with her family. They visited the Anne Frank house and, she saw graphic pictures of what happened during the Holocaust. She finally realized what actually happened and, she felt very sick from looking at the pictures. When she got older, movies and documentaries about the Holocaust were released and she had more knowledge of what had happened. She felt very disgusted watching the films.  

Did your family go through the Holocaust?

No one in Lauren’s immediate family went through the Holocaust. She told me if they did, she would not be here talking to me. Her father's family came to American before World War I from Russia and Poland. Her mother's family came to America in 1920 because they wanted religious freedom and the Jews were being persecuted in Eastern Europe. They wanted to leave because they believed things would get worse. Rose Goldstein (grandmother) wanted her sister Breina (Great Aunt) to come with her to America. Breina did not want to leave Russia because her husband did not want to go and she did not want to leave him. Twenty-one years later, the Nazis invaded Russia. Breina and her husband’s family did not go to camps. Instead, the Nazis lined them up on and shot them into a ravine. The family did not hear anything from her and they wanted to find out if she was okay. Years later, after the war, they found out what happened to Breina and the family.

This is a photograph of the synagogue in Shepetovka, Ukraine, where my maternal grandparents worshipped. It was a stone building that was built in the late 1800s. It no longer exists, but
Shepetovka now has a two room synagogue that was first rebuilt by the Soviets after WW II and used as a basketball court. More recently, the synagogue was rebuilt by the tiny Jewish community. There are now approximately 175 Jews in Shepetovka, compared to the estimated 3700 Jews who lived there when my grandparents left in 1919 .(source: http://jewua.org/about-us/)

How did the Holocaust affect your family?
Did it affect you as well?

The Holocaust affected her mother greatly. Her mother talked about the Holocaust all the time. Lauren’s parents believed it could happen again. Even though her parents were born in the U.S., they never felt completely safe. If something political happened, they would wonder if it was good or bad for the Jews. Lauren does not have the exact same feelings as her parents. She does not feel the same danger but, she is aware of genocides and sees it more as a global issue. She did have a panic attack when the white supremacists had the protest in Charlottesville. The supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us” and they chanted the same things as the Nazis. Seeing this on T.V. made her very scared and shocked. It did remind her of the Holocaust because there were Nazis doing the exact same thing during the War.

Do you feel resentment towards Germans or Germany?

Lauren said it took her a long time to get over hating the Germans. She thought they were horrible. She had this idea that all Germans were evil and, she would never go to Germany. In her twenties, she started to work with people who were from Germany. She was surprised how nice they were and all of them felt bad about the Holocaust. Now, she has no issues with Germans or Germany because she has met and worked with people who were from Germany.

Do you think the Holocaust re-shaped you as a person?

She thinks it did re-shape her as a person. Lauren is aware of what evil people are capable of. She thinks that this awareness changes how she feels about the world. She said she wants to be brave enough to save someone in trouble. She asks herself does she have the courage to do so? Also, Lauren is grateful that her relatives left Europe and came to America. She believes she could not leave everything behind. Lauren wishes she could be as courageous as her relatives.  

I was surprised that she had a direct relative that was involved in the Holocaust. I was not expecting her Great Aunt to be shot instead of going to the camps. When she told me this I felt very sad because it was cruel. Also, I thought she would still have hard feelings for the Germans because they did horrible things to the Jews. If I was her I probably would still feel resentment. I agree with her about having courage. I don’t think I would be willing to sacrifice my life for someone in trouble. It would be a tough decision for me to leave everything and go to another country. It was great talking to my aunt because I got to know a lot more about her and her family.

This is a memorial to the Jews that were shot in the forest outside of Shepetovka into mass graves in 1941 and 1942. My great aunt Breina was one of them.

White Teacher/Black History

“I feared not just the violence of this world, but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to... be taken seriously by colleagues, and ...so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” These words would be spoken... as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. ” ― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me  (2015)

“It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.” ― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

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This semester a class of Menlo College literature students are reading both James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son and  Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.  After the readings and class discussions they must write a paper identifying one or more shared central themes. The next step, on the path to a final essay, is to compare and contrast the works in terms of  style and substance. 

On the surface, the assignment seems straightforward enough--at least to me.  Both works were created some sixty years apart by African American writers/activists. Both works are structured as conversations with and reflections upon the difficulties faced by generations of  black men in America.  Coates structures his book as a letter to son, and Baldwin's essay is an attempt to understand his father's anger and bitterness--the senior Baldwin having died in 1943, when his son was just nineteen.  In each book, the themes of  white supremacy, police brutality, rage, violence and despair are maddeningly the same. It's dangerous to be a black man in America.

Here's Baldwin, again, in Notes of A Native Son, reflecting upon his own father's death: 

"I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me."

And here's Coates addressing the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C. earlier this year: 

"If you are attempting to study American history and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America."

Over the past few weeks, many students from many different  backgrounds have come into the Writing Center asking for help with this assignment. And they are not there to process the passion of Coates and Baldwin. First and foremost, they are challenged by the compare and contrast elements of the assignment--in essence, two assignments in one. Which quotes should the students select to illustrate their thesis and how should they introduce and place the quotes? 

But wait--first they need a thesis!

 
Most started with a statement like:
"Its dangerous to live in a black body in America."




When I reminded them that the works were written six decades apart, some modified the thesis to:

"It's still dangerous to live in a black body in America."

Some began with: The Obama era is clearly over. 

Others stated Lincoln's words "all men are created equal" were and are meaningless to black people in America. 

As for writing style, most of the students of all backgrounds thought that Coates was the better writer because his direct reporting style was easier for them to understand. Coates writes of "guns to the head, and hands in pockets," while Baldwin has a more poetic language of "antidotes" and "impossiblities"--frequently calling upon the Lord for salvation.


I prefer Baldwin, but I kept out of it. 

Still, judging from the quality of their first drafts, there were a lot of students who read the works carefully, and I wanted to ask each of them how reading these words affected them personally. But that's not my role at the Writing Center. Instead I acted as a (hopefully) competent surgeon, inserting commas, rearranging paragraphs, and parsing quotes, even with Coates' and Baldwin's blood running all over the pages.

Would the students even answer my more personal questions?  I mean, how comfortable would African American young adults be discussing white supremacy with a white professor with graying hair. And there was every possibility that if we got into it at the Writing Center, somebody was going to say something that hurt somebody, and the Writing Center is, by its very mission, a safe place.

The student that  I most wanted to talk to turned out to be  an eighteen-year-old African American woman who came into the writing center exhausted after pulling an all-nighter. At first, I did not think that any conversation would be possible, let alone editing. She was leaning on the table, her head resting on clasped hands.

"Do you want to come back another time," I asked.
"No", she sighed dramatically. "Let's just do this."
She had nothing written on paper, but quotes were underlined in both works.

San Francisco Rally/December 2015

"So what do you think the theme is?" I asked, somewhat weary myself. Hers was the fifth Coates/Baldwin assignment I had worked on that day.

"The theme is WAITING."
"Waiting for what?" I asked.
She picked her head up and looked me in the eye.
"Waiting......... to explode!"
"Okay...put that idea into a thesis"

I don't remember enough to record her word-for-word thesis. But the sentences looked something like this:
African Americans get so frustrated and angry but for a lot of reasons they can't react right away.  Eventually those who feel most vulnerable and powerless will explode in violence. But when they explode white people will kill them.

So here's what I was thinking.
Someday, was this exhausted young woman going to wake up and explode?
Was it going to happen anytime soon?
Had she seen anyone die because they exploded?
What kinds of injustices would make me explode?
I thought of how I felt watching white supremacists march in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us."
I didn't share that feeling with her.
She had not asked me to share.
I  didn't say to the student, "I know how Baldwin and Coates' rage must feel, because when I was watching the Nazis march in Charlottesville....." 
Because I really, truly, don't know her experience.
I'm not even sure I know mine. 

What I said was:

"You know, in the first sentence you need to put a comma after the word angry and before the word, "BUT", because the word BUT separates two independent clauses. You also need a comma between the clauses "when they explode" and "white people will kill them."

I  hesitantly suggested changing the word "will"--as in "white people will kill them" to a softer "might"--as in "white people might kill them."

I'm not sure if she made that change.

My student left the Writing Center with a well constructed essay. As she was packing up her laptop, I could not resist asking just one question--just one.  

"Do you think that Americans will be reading essays like Coates' and Baldwin's sixty years from now?"

"Yes", she answered, without a bit of doubt.
"But maybe next time the writer will be a woman."