The “great cranberry scare of 1959” began just before Thanksgiving when the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur S. Flemming, announced the seizure by the government of a small amount of cranberries from the Pacific Northwest, suspected of being contaminated by a possible cancer-causing pesticide, aminotriazole. A local matter turned into a national scare when Flemming told a reporter Americans shouldn’t buy any cranberries unless they knew where they had been grown.

Over the next weeks, newspapers carried stories from scientists giving opposing views on the dangers of the pesticide,…