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Chilean grape scare in 1989 was a scare involving two grapes in Chile that were found to be tainted with Cyanide. None were found upon testing. There was a ban of Chilean food exports because of this. The Food and Drug Administration warned people not to eat grapes after investigators found traces of cyanide in some seedless red grapes shipped from Chile to Philadelphia.

The agency also warned that the country of origin of all other non-citrus fruit should be checked before it is eaten, and all Chilean fruit should be discarded.

"This may be an isolated incident, but we can hardly take that chance," said FDA Commissioner Frank E. Young.

The order affects most of the fresh fruit now available in the nation's stores. Chile is virtually the only winter source for most fruit other than bananas and citrus, FDA officials said.

The Scare

The individual who telephoned the U.S. embassy in Santiago on March 2 seemed to understand that 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 Cézanne still lifes be hazardous?

notability

This scare came during the Cold War, and it was believed that the contaminated grapes came from the rebels, wanting to get America to distrust the Communist government of Chile.

References

• http://www.fortfreedom.org/l28.htm
• The Cyanide Scare; a Tale of Two Grapes