Cranberry Conspiracy Pt. 2

Now, as everyone knows, the second aspect of the conspiracy is even more insidious. They make you think you actually like cranberries.

I think this is where it gets considerably more dastardly. As indicated in my previous post, the cranberry is a desperation fruit. If you can't get a potato to grow, or want some variety and citrus is out of the question, you try your hand at cranberries.

Around the turn of the century, not this last one, the other one, there was this HUGE bumper crop of cranberries. Farmers were up to their eyeballs in cranberries. This guy named Karl Marx had had this brilliant idea of how to deal with this situation from an economic perspective. A guy named Engle, a businessman, helped him develop it. People call what resulted communism, but it is more accurate to think of it as a commune, or as the farmers referred to it, a "cooperative". The idea was that if they "cooperated" and pooled their resources, for advertising, lobbying and research, they'd be much better off.

It started slowly, with attempts to market the cranberry as something good for you. It's not as bad as, say arsenic, but it's not exactly good for you either. It's health benefits are negligible. A myth that lasted for years indicated that it was good for urinary tract infections. That myth has held since I was a child. Succeeding research says that it can decrease bladder infections, but only as a preventive measure. Once you've got a problem, it is no better than water.

Now, this particular aspect of things takes on a life of its own at this point. During prohibition, people were doing all kinds of crazy things to get drunk. "Bathtub gin" was a common creation. The horrid taste of the stuff is what led people to try and come up with creative ways to kill the taste. This is why, to this day, nearly a third of all alcohol drinks in any bartender's guide involve cranberry juice.

You can, if you're a media historian, go back to a movie as well received as "The Thin Man" and see an example of post prohibition drink making near the beginning, as Nick Charles explains to a group of bartenders how to make a proper martini. I refer to it only as an interesting aside, as I don't recall any mention of cranberries there.

After prohibition, and the limited consumer rights protection of the era, the cranberry was able to be marketed as something other than a way to kill the taste of crappy alcohol. In those days, the likes of Betty Crocker and other recipe books for mass consumption were being developed. The cranberry cooperatives saw this as a way to market their product. Once an ingredient was in one of these books, they were sure to become part of the American Way.