Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

These days, we demand answers from our food.

Please place it in the bag in here.

Is it organic? All natural. Non-GMO.

We check labels and obsessively read articles about ingredients that cause or prevent cancer.

It wasn't always this way, though.

For decades, even centuries, it was sort of like what teachers tell school children on Cupcake Day,

chocolate, vanilla, or sprinkles.

Hey, you get what you get and you don't get upset.

That is, until 1959,

when the country's awareness of what's in our food was kick-started by a panic over one single piece of food.

A berry.

It was just weeks before Thanksgiving when Arthur Fleming, the secretary of what was then called the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

made a startling announcement. Cranberries in the Pacific Northwest had been contaminated by a

weed killer that was known to cause cancer in rats. He advised people to be on the safe side and avoid buying cranberries with uncertain origins.

Well, the reaction was swift.

Grocery chains removed cranberry products from their shelves.

Restaurants cut them from their menus.

Berries were dropping like flies.

Newspapers ran front page stories on the issue for weeks.

They offered recipes of alternative side dishes for Thanksgiving.

Things like lingenberries and pickled pear.

...