(Photo of cranberry sauce)

Ocean Spray cranberry sauce, Lakeville-Middleboro, MA

Ingredients: cranberries, high fructose corn syrup, water, corn syrup

The cranberry is one of three fruits native to North America, and it grows wild from Maine to North Carolina. American Indians ate cranberries in pemmican (small cakes of dried meat mixed with fat and berries), and also used the fruit for dyes and medicine. According to legends, American Indians introduced cranberries to white settlers at the first Thanksgiving, which at least partly explains why we still eat cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving today. New Englanders discovered that boiling the cranberries with maple sugar produced a bittersweet taste and soon cranberry sauce became part of their diet (Economist 2004).

Growing cranberries requires a poorly drained, higly acidic combination of peat and clay. In 1816, a farmer in Cape Cod noticed that the largest and juiciest cranberries grew in places where the wind blew sand over the plants. Farmers began to spread sand over their cultivated plants, and thus, the wild cranberry was tamed. In the 1960s, cranberry growers began to flood their fields, and would whoosh the cranberries from their vines, with a kind of overgrown eggbeater. This technique doubled picking productivity. The harvesting and processing of cranberries is among the most mechnaized processes of all crops (Economist 2004).

Ocean Spray is a cooperative that is now owned by more than 800 growers. In 2003, the company sold $1.2 billion worth of cranberry products. The company decided to create a year-round market after losing a whole year's sales due to pesticide residues in their cranberries. Ocean Spray now controls 54 percent of the cranberry juice market. In 2004, Ocean Spray's cranberry harvest exceeded 270,000 tons (Economist 2004).