The 1989 produce panic becomes an international incident
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# Fright cocktail, part 2: Shoddy Goods 045 ### The 1989 produce panic becomes an international incident
Jason Toon
May 27
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Last time on Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stories behind consumer culture, we remembered how America lost its collective shit over fruit in 1989. First it was fear of apples treated with the chemical Alar. Then an entire country's fruit suddenly became a threat. I'm Jason Toon here with the thrilling conclusion…
Feds seize major shipment of primo Chilean Santiago's characteristic grey-brown smog settled into the mountain bowl surrounding the city. It was March 2, 1989, a warm late-summer day in the Chilean capital. The talk of the town was the possible imminent end of the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power in 1973. After a surprise rejection of Pinochet's rule in a referendum the previous year, the regime was negotiating with the opposition over a new constitution. But when the phone rang at the U.S. embassy, it wasn't about any of that. It was about grapes. The anonymous caller said he was a Chilean who had injected cyanide into grapes being shipped to the United States. "I think it was to the effect that he didn’t have a job," said Deputy Chief of Mission George F. Jones of the call, "and the economy was going to hell, and nobody would listen to him. So he just wanted to warn us that he had taken this dramatic act of protest." Just as the panic over the apple-preservation chemical Alar or daminozide was peaking, more fruit was about to start haunting America's nightmares. This time, there'd be much less reason for it, and much more pain from the fallout. Ouch! Right in the fruit basket But of all the things for a lone wolf Chilean terrorist to target, why grapes? How big a deal could that really be? Pretty big, it turns out. Since the 1960s, Chile had been developing into the main off-season fruit supplier for the U.S. market. Their Southern Hemisphere seasons meant whatever was out of season up north was in season down there. The long, narrow, coastal country's varied geography helped, too. "Overlay Chile on the (U.S.) West Coast," fruit importer Rick Eastes told the Los Angeles Times in 1985, "and it stretches from Juneau to Baja, with the same range of climate." That meant fresh nectarines, peaches, and plums in U.S. stores in January, and a quadrupling in size of Chilean fruit plantings since 1965.
Chilean fruit labels from happier times By the time that phone call was made, Chile exported some 300,000 metric tonnes of fruit to the United States every year. And the biggest crop of them all was table grapes - indeed, Chile was (and remains) the U.S.'s biggest source of imported grapes. If the caller's aim was to cause panic in both countries, he chose his target well. At first, Chilean and American government officials dismissed the call as a hoax. But when the professed poisoner made a second call on March 9 warning that the threat was serious, the American embassy duly reported it to Washington. "But that of course meant that it went to the Department of Agriculture, U.S. Customs and all these agencies in Washington who had no ability to discriminate between one kind of information and another," Jones says. This time, 150 inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration met the cargo ship Almeria Star in Philadelphia. Out of 12,000 crates of grapes and other fruit, they found all of three grapes with puncture marks. Two of those grapes tested positive for trace amounts of cyanide. That's two grapes, not two crates. Two grapes out of millions. The next day, the FDA ordered all Chilean fruit imports halted, urged stores to remove Chilean fruit from the shelves, and urged consumers not to eat it. The full-on fruit panic had hit. I screamed it through the grapevine Even more than the daminozide scare, America was primed for this one. Anxiety over product tampering had been running high since some psycho killed at least 7 people by poisoning Tylenol bottles in 1982, as coincidentally chronicled in a new Netflix docuseries released the day this newsletter goes to press. That revived old myths about Halloween candy packed with razorblades or poison. A lot of us '80s kids spent a few Halloween nights at home or at organized events instead of trick-or-treating, despite the fact that to this day, no child has ever been injured or killed by tampered-with candy from a stranger (although recently one neo-Nazi planned just such an atrocity). America had certainly seen its share of deranged loner murders over the past decade or two, along periodic terrorist attacks. The fact that this threat originated from Latin America, a region that only seemed to make headlines for civil strife and violence, made this spectre that much scarier for many people.
These Chilean protestors at the U.S. embassy were angry, but it was nice of them to bring fruit On the other hand: two freaking grapes. With 0.52 parts per million of cyanide - "not enough, it turns out, to give a toddler a stomachache," as Margaret Carlson wrote in Time magazine. Schools dumped untold amounts of fresh fruit. Supermarkets offered no-questions-asked refunds for the suspect produce. A million crates of Chilean fruit sat in the holds of ships off the U.S. coast, not getting any fresher. Poison control centers were flooded with calls from panicked grape-eaters. “We advised them of the fast-acting nature of cyanide, which takes effect in one or two minutes,” said Chicago hospital official Jack Lipscomb. “Basically, if they’re still alive and kicking to get to the phone, they probably don’t have anything to worry about.” In Chile, the reaction was less fear and more white-hot rage. "The consequences of the thoughtless U.S. decision are worse than those of several earthquakes," said Domingo Duran, president of the National Farm Producers Association, announcing that 40,000 Chilean agriculture workers had been laid off. "It is totally irresponsible to react like that because of two tainted grapes." Indeed, Duran said, the impact of the reaction just made the food supply a more tempting target, "paving the way for terrorism against the international food trade in the future." Not a bad point. Less plausibly, regime mouthpieces variously blamed Marxist subversives, the CIA, or the Israelis. As demonstrators brandished grapes at the U.S. embassy in Santiago, the country's president-for-life fronted up to the cameras and popped a couple of white grapes into his mouth to prove how safe they were. For some reason, the endorsement of wizened, bemedaled torturer Augusto Pinochet proved less than reassuring to American consumers.
The Pinochet seal of approval. Oh, NOW I feel better More effective was back-channel diplomacy between Chilean and U.S. officials, and a more thorough FDA inspection of the Almeria Star shipment that found no more traces of anything untoward. By March 17, a week after the ban was implemented, the FDA announced that fruit imports from Chile could resume under a more stringent inspection regime. To this day, nobody knows who made those phone calls to the embassy. It's 1989 somewhere So both of these fruit scares fizzled out. After the FDA rolled out the new stricter rules, Chilean fruit was back on U.S. store shelves and in U.S. kitchens. ''People have been buying them like crazy,'' grocer Jack Repole told the New York Times on March 25. ''They were filling their bags up with grapes. Nobody seemed afraid of anything.'' Chileans didn't forget so easily. The Pinochet dictatorship gave way to a democratic government in 1990, but a lawsuit by Chilean grape growers against the FDA kept the issue simmering. Anger boiled over in 1994 when a lawyer for the growers used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a transcript of another call to the U.S. embassy in Santiago. In this one, from June 1989, three months after the call that started all this, the same caller said it had been a hoax all along. The fact that this had been suppressed for five years was nothing less than "grapegate", an irate Chilean senator charged. Looking at the rise of the Chilean fruit industry from the vantage point of today, those few weeks in 1989 don't even register as a blip. Chile is still the biggest exporter of grapes to the U.S., at over $600 million worth a year, and of nectarines and mandarins, at over $200 million. Fruit is now one of the country's biggest export industries: 6% of Chilean workers depend directly or indirectly on fruit. As for Alar, the scientific validity, or not, of a ban became something of a moot point when Uniroyal voluntarily discontinued making it. Only 5% of American growers had been using Alar even before the ban anyway, and the industry moved on without much disruption or lasting damage to its reputation. U.S. apple consumption quickly regained lost ground, and apples' position as the second most-popular fruit in America (to bananas) was never seriously threatened. Nowadays the Alar scare is remembered mainly by corporate-funded front groups like the American Council on Science and Health as a cautionary tale about the dangers of regulation. It's the "lady who spilled McDonald's coffee" of food safety, the cliche that industry apologists reach for to deflect critical scrutiny.
You know you've hit the big time when you make the funny papers But this one-two punch made a cultural impression. Even if one was a total hoax and the other mostly an overreaction, even if neither made a lasting dent in their corners of the fruit biz, this was the first time many Americans considered that they might not be able to trust even the healthiest foods in the supermarket. These twin panics planted a seed that bore fruit (sorry) in the explosion of wellness and nutrition pseudoscience that now threatens to undo the last century or two of medical advancement. The spirit of 1989 is still with us every time some well-intentioned victim of food-fear hustlers gets salmonella from raw milk, or gets hospitalized because of their carnivore diet, or falls for the "dihydrogen monoxide" gag. Because whatever the merits of these two cases, it's demonstrably true that big business has routinely tried to hide and discredit any scientific findings that threaten their bottom line, from thalidomide to cigarettes to CO2 emissions. As long as that's the case, mistrust of science will keep spreading, and grifters will keep preying on confused, frightened people. And that's something we should all feel panicky about. All right, while we read over more fruit scares in America, let’s talk about a simpler, more wholesome topic: What’s your favorite fruit? This could be what you eat every morning, or it could be that rare thing you once had in another country and yearn to one day taste again. Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat. —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear, and the wacky stuff people bought, or tried to get other people to buy: Fright cocktail, part 1: the apple scare of 1989 The guy who put candy at the supermarket checkout The Vanitory: Formica tries to invent a new piece of furniture
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