Word: fruits
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...fruit. The terrorist who telephoned the U.S. embassy in Santiago on March 2 seemed to understand that, as Alfred Hitchcock showed in The Birds, the most deep-seated fears are engendered when the benign suddenly turns menacing. The saboteur had no explosives to rig, no bomb-sniffing dogs to elude, no metal detector to foil -- only some fruit and a little poison. And that was more than enough. Just two little grapes were found to have been injected with cyanide -- not enough, it turns out, to give a toddler a stomachache -- and the country was thrown into a panic...
Those two punctured grapes, discovered on March 12 in a shipment unloaded from the cargo ship Almeria Star in Philadelphia, forced millions of Americans to ask themselves, however fleetingly, whether to take a risk by eating. That the fruit at the salad bar, the peach in Johnny's lunch box, the raspberries in the refrigerator, could be poisonous turned the world upside down. Could the stuff of vitamin C and Cezanne still lifes be hazardous? Was an apple a day more likely to bring the doctor than keep him away? What was the world coming...
Traditional risk assessment weighs the magnitude of the danger against the probability it will occur. The chance of dying from a cyanide-laced piece of fruit was infinitesimally small compared to the possibility of being run over by the proverbial bus on the way to the supermarket. But rather than issue a warning to examine fruit carefully, the Food and Drug Administration impounded ! 2 million crates of fruit at airports and docks in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Miami -- a still life of waste -- and advised consumers not to eat any Chilean fruit, which includes most of the peaches, blueberries, blackberries...
Some, particularly the Chileans, whose estimated $600 million fruit and vegetable industry was crippled, felt the U.S. had vastly overreacted. FDA Commissioner Frank Young explained his action with the statement that he would rather be "safe than sorry," and many Americans no doubt agreed with...
Ironically, it was the Government's failure to apply a safe-rather-than- sorry standard to another fruit that set off a similar fruit frenzy a week earlier. It started with a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group, that apples treated with the growth regulator Alar were soaking small children with dangerously high levels of daminozide, a possible carcinogen. 60 Minutes aired the story, and actress Meryl Streep, now a leading lady in the fight against pesticides, was quickly booked solid on talk shows and Capitol Hill. Soon apples were ordered removed from school cafeterias...