The Cranberry Boggle (Contd.)

BUREAUCRACY The Cranberry Boggle (Contd.) " 'What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done?' " intoned a worried cranberry merchant in Washington last week, taking Isaiah (5:4) for his text. Bible-quoting George C. P. Olson, president of Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., the big growers' cooperative, thus put it straight to Arthur Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, who threw growers and housewives into a panic the week before with his declaration--based upon mouse tests--that cranberries tainted with the weed killer aminotriazole might cause cancer (TIME, Nov. 23). Said Olson: "You have placed the entire cranberry crop of the U.S. under suspicion, and we are confronted by the situation where we are adjudged guilty and must prove our innocence."

After hours of wrangling between industry lawyers and Government officials, both Flemming and the cranberrymen (who have already given up use of the chemical altogether) agreed to keep on testing samples from cranberry lots. Products found free from taint were to be so labeled (Certified Safe, Examined and Passed), and freed for sale to housewives preparing for Thanksgiving. Obviously, not all of the 70-odd million Ibs. of the holiday batch could be tested in time. Shoppers who could not find certified stocks at their grocers would have to take their chances with untested lots--if indeed the stores saw fit to sell them--or do without.

HEW Secretary Flemming's Food and Drug Administration was getting ready for another fight of the same sort last week--this time with the $80 million-a-year lipstick industry. FDA chemists charge that 17 different coal-tar dyes used in lipsticks caused either death or illness when fed to rats. The lipstick makers insist nonetheless that women never digest more than an infinitesimal speck of lipstick, and that the FDA's attack is grossly unfair. Probable next step: a public hearing to discuss FDA's ban on the dyes, now scheduled to go into effect Jan. 6.

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