The Berry That Bounces
I often ask myself why some foods arrive in our lives already wrapped in ritual.
The cranberry is one of them. For most of the year it barely exists for us. Then November comes, and suddenly it is everywhere: Glistening in a bowl, sliding out of a can with the ridges still on it, strung on thread, floating in a flooded field like a red sea.
We rarely ask what it is. We only ask where it is.
So let's go find it.
The story usually starts in New Jersey in the late 1800s, with a grower named John Webb, who, the story goes, had a wooden leg and little patience for carrying heavy loads of berries down a flight of stairs. So he poured them down instead. The firm, sound berries bounced to the bottom. The soft, bruised ones stayed stuck on the steps. Whether it happened on a cellar stair or in a barn, in the 1840s or in 1880, depends on who is telling it. But the principle stuck, and growers still sort cranberries today by how well they bounce.
The next leap came from a lawyer. In 1912, Marcus Urann set up a cooking and canning operation at his bog in Hanson, Massachusetts, and began selling cranberry sauce under the name Ocean Spray. In 1930 he joined with two other growers to form the cooperative that still carries the name. By 1941, the jellied log, the one that keeps the shape of its can, was sold nationwide.
And then, in November 1959, it almost all came apart.
On November 9, two and a half weeks before Thanksgiving, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming announced that some cranberries from Oregon and Washington had tested positive for aminotriazole, a weed killer that caused thyroid tumors in rats. Grocers pulled cranberry products from their shelves. Growers called it "Black Monday." Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, both campaigning for president, ate cranberries in front of the press to calm the country.
Flemming didn't have much of a choice. A year earlier, Congress had passed the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, and its Delaney Clause said that no amount of an additive found to cause cancer in animals could be allowed in food. Not a small amount. None.
This was a new kind of fear: The fear of what you cannot see inside something you love.
Now the science, because the cranberry is a strange little machine.
Cut one in half and you will find four hollow chambers, air pockets that let the berry float. That is the whole secret of the wet harvest you see in photos. Growers flood the bog, knock the berries loose with water reels, and the fruit rises to the surface to be corralled.
Something like 90% of the crop is gathered this way now. The bounce works for the same reason: A sound berry with intact chambers and firm walls is springy. A rotting one is not.
Inside those walls is one of the most acidic fruits we eat. Cranberries carry citric, malic and quinic acids, and a pH somewhere around 2.5, a little lower than a lemon. They also carry benzoic acid, the same molecule that, as sodium benzoate, sits in the ingredient list of your soda (nature beat the preservative industry to it by a few million years!). Together, the acid and the benzoate are a big part of why fresh cranberries keep for weeks in the fridge while raspberries turn to fur in days.
Then there is the pectin, the long chains of galacturonic acid in the cell walls. Add heat and sugar and enough acid, and those chains link up and trap water into a gel. That is the jellied log: Not a trick of industry, but a property of the berry itself, coaxed into the shape of a can.
If you are bottling a cranberry product, that natural acidity is doing regulatory work for you. A pH well below 4.6 keeps it out of the low-acid canned food rules that govern things like beans and soups, but it is still worth measuring every batch rather than assuming.
The irony is hard to miss. The cranberry is one of nature's best-defended fruits: Sour, bitter, armored with its own preservatives. And the scare of 1959 wasn't about anything the cranberry made. It was about something we put on it.
I keep coming back to those four air chambers.
The berry is built to float. In the wild, cranberries grow in bogs and wetlands, and a fruit that floats can travel. It can drift on spring meltwater to a new patch of peat and start again. My bet is that the chambers are, at heart, a seed's way of catching a ride.
So every November, when we flood a bog and watch the berries rise, we are borrowing the plant's own plan. It made a fruit to be carried away by water. We carry it away by truck instead, and we eat it, and in eating it we carry it further than any flood could.
That is the deal most fruit makes with the world. Be eaten. Be carried. Begin again somewhere else.
We just happen to set a table for it.
Bounce. Float. Keep.
Dr. Bryan Quoc Le is the Founder and Principal Food Consultant of Mendocino Food Consulting. He earned his Ph.D. in Food Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and his B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine. He currently lives in Mendocino, California with his wife and two dogs.
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