Cape Cod History

2003: Cranberries help pols win elections

This week in 2003 the Christian Science Monitor was advising politicians to eat more cranberries if they wanted to win in November. Below is the start of that cautionary tale.

Cranberries kick the can
The fall fruit no longer appears only as jellied sauce in a can.
It now stars in soups, cereals, and maybe elections.

To all politicians running for office in the next election, here's some free advice: Grab, hire, lure, shanghai whoever has been running the public-relations campaign for cranberries in the United States during the past few decades.

A final word for Gary Coleman: Gary, big guy, you may have come up a little short in the California gubernatorial election, but get in touch with one of those cranberry PR folks. After all, there's always the White House in 2004.

Had actor Gary Coleman hired those cranberry PR folks, he'd be governor of California.

Why? Look around your supermarket. Cranberries are everywhere, in everything: breakfast cereals, ice cream, sparkling water, jams and jellies, candy bars, pies, cold soups, chutneys, granola, muffins. There's even a cranberry ketchup. And juice. Especially juice. And not just plain cranberry juice. It's getting more difficult to find a juice that doesn't have cranberries - Cranapple, Cranraspberry, Crangrape. In fact, today most cranberries go into juice production. Not surprising. It takes about 4,400 berries to produce every gallon of cranberry juice.

A more recent introduction to the growing cranberry market are white cranberries. The variety is harvested a few weeks earlier than its more colorful cousin, and is used primarily in white cranberry juice, where it is blended with white grape juice. (The juice is rather insipid and lacks the traditional snap of the red.)

It wasn't long ago that cranberries made a once-a-year cameo appearance at Thanksgiving, usually in the form of canned cranberry jell. That red, slimy blob with ribs squiggled so much that it appeared to have a life of its own.

Although it was clearly the most colorful addition to my family's dinner table, it was in the shadow of Mother's roast turkey, the sweet-potato casserole (don't forget the minimarshmallows), and Grandmother's frozen string-bean casserole (smothered with canned onion rings)... Christian Science Monitor.