This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

And our next story comes to us from a man who is simply known as the History Guy.

His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube.

The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories.

400 million pounds of cranberries are consumed by Americans each year. 20% of that is during the week of Thanksgiving.

That's 80 million pounds in a week.

And 5 million gallons of jelly cranberry sauce are consumed by Americans every holiday season as well.

Here's the history guide to share the story of the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.

The history of U.S. regulation of domestically produced food and pharmaceuticals goes back to the end of the 19th century,

and a pioneering researcher named Harvey Washington Wiley, who was the chief chemist

of the Department of Agriculture's Division of Chemistry.

And from those early beginnings, a regulatory environment developed in fits and starts over time

as consumers and government and industry taught to develop the best way

to protect the nation's food supply. And one of the first great tests of that regulatory environment

came in 1959 when a new regulation ran into a venerable product and resulted in what has

been described as the nation's first great food scare. The great cranberry scare of 1959 changed the way

Americans looked at their food, trusted their government, and consumed their cranberries.

It's history that deserves to be remembered. Born in 1844, Harvey Wiley was a Civil War veteran who had degrees in both medicine and chemistry.

He was offered the post of chief chemists for the Department of Agriculture in 1882, largely because of his expertise in the chemistry of sugar, as the department was interested in growing a U.S. sugar industry based on sorghum.

In the position, Wiley started conducting research into the adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs on sorghum. In the position, while he started conducting research into the

adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs on the American market, including so-called

...