Depending on your palate, cranberry juice is either terrifically tart or unbearably bitter. Some prefer a sugar-infused cranberry juice cocktail, or a blended drink that pairs cranberry with other juices to tamp down on the pucker. (Cowards!) Others mix like their cranberry with vodka in adult cocktails, including the cosmopolitan.
Whether you’re extricating a jellied log from its can this Thanksgiving or simmering your own gourmet sauce, cranberries are more New Jersey than most of us will ever be. Alongside blueberries, they’re one of the jewels of the Pinelands — a native state fruit whose waterborne, ruby red harvest arrives each October.
So when Assemblywoman Carol Murphy, D-Burlington County, introduced a bill this week to make cranberry juice the state beverage, she had hundreds of years of history backing her up.
“Cranberries are one of the biggest products for farmers in New Jersey," Murphy tells NJ Advance Media. She put the bill forward after receiving 20 letters from fourth grade students at Eleanor Rush Intermediate School in Cinnaminson.
“Some people might think it’s silly to (have) a cranberry juice bill. But you know what? It isn’t silly because fourth graders put it there," Murphy says.
An Ocean Spray bottling plant operated for more than 70 years in Bordentown before relocating in 2015. The company still has a receiving station in Chatsworth.Ocean Spray via Target
Their teacher, Erin Zarzycki, had covered state symbols as part of the curriculum. When the students noticed that New Jersey didn’t have a state beverage, she encouraged them to research cranberries to come up with key points that Murphy incorporated into the bill, like the fact that Ocean Spray got its start in New Jersey. (Tomato juice didn’t really catch their fancy, and most people aren’t sitting around drinking blueberry juice on its own.)
Now, they’re hoping to get state Sen. Troy Singleton (D-Burlington) involved as a sponsor.
“They’re super pumped,” Zarzycki says. "They feel like they’re famous. I told them we’re going down in history.”
As for Murphy, she isn’t exactly a fan of sipping on some cran, but she does see it as indispensable to the local economy.
| Related: The case for the cranberry, New Jersey’s native Thanksgiving fruit |
“I use it in cooking," she says. "I don’t just drink it straight.”
In 2018, Murphy introduced a bill to make the blueberry cheesecake muffin the state muffin after 12-year-old Delize Patterson of Voorhees made a request. (The highbush blueberry became the state fruit in 2004.)
“It’s about our younger generation, and kids getting involved and understanding what our civics is," she says of her advancement of food-based legislation. "How a bill becomes a law.”
A scene from the cranberry harvest at Pine Island Cranberry Company in Chatsworth.Pine Island Cranberry Company
New Jersey is closely entwined with the mass marketing of cranberries.
New Egypt’s Elizabeth Lee, who is noted for helping to popularize cranberry sauce, was one of three growers who founded the Ocean Spray collective in 1930, which now includes more than 700 growers. Cranberry juice cocktail was among the company’s first products, along with that famous (and infamous) jellied cranberry sauce.
Starting in 1943, Ocean Spray operated a cranberry juice bottling plant in Bordentown, producing 32 million cases per year. In 2015, after more than 70 years, the operation moved to Upper Macungie Township, Pennsylvania.
New Jersey ranks fourth in American cranberry production, behind Oregon (No. 3), Massachusetts (No. 2) and Wisconsin (No. 1).
“New Jersey and Oregon are neck and neck every year,” says Karen Cahill, spokeswoman for the Cranberry Marketing Committee in Wareham, Massachusetts. In 2018, the state produced 447,000 barrels (one barrel equals 100 pounds), while Oregon brought in 544,000.
“Any publicity for cranberry is awesome," Cahill says of the Assembly bill. "There’s such a long history in the United States, and so many of these growers are sixth or seventh generation.”
The Pine Island Cranberry Company in Chatsworth has been in operation since 1890, says Stefanie Haines, the company’s social media coordinator and a member of the cranberry family’s fifth generation. All of the company’s harvest goes to the receiving station for the Ocean Spray grower cooperative, also in Chatsworth, where thousands of tons of cranberries arrive each harvest.
Cranberries are poured from a crate into a hopper at Ocean Spray's Bordentown plant in 1996.Star-Ledger file photo
Her grandfather, Bill Haines, is important to the history of cranberry production because he made improvements to wet harvesting, the way most cranberries are collected today.
“I do think, genuinely, it’s a really nice way to bring some focus onto one of the more niche crops in the Garden State," Haines, 47, says of the bill. “It is really nice to see that people are paying more attention to cranberry. It can be tough to market," she says, unlike the blueberries that Pine Island also grows.
“I like the plain old cranberry juice cocktail straight up," she says, or the Pure Cranberry product sold by Ocean Spray, which has no added sugar. “You add a little bit to seltzer and it’s very good.”
When it comes to state beverages, however, New Jersey is slipping. Massachusetts, the home base for Ocean Spray, anointed cranberry juice as its pick back in 1970. It’s the only state in the nation to do so. While Wisconsin’s state fruit is the cranberry, that state, along with 19 others, went with milk for their drink of choice.
“I think having cranberries represented in this way would be a great acknowledgement for all the family farms," says Shawn Cutts, president of the American Cranberry Growers Association, which represents cranberry growers in New Jersey.
And what of those who pshaw cranberry juice in general?
Workers move cranberries to a vacuum for washing on the property of Stephen and Abbott Lee in Chatsworth in 2003.Star-Ledger file photo
“You have to look back at the legacy of cranberry farming here in the state and how the cranberry growers have played an important role in New Jersey agriculture, and particularly Pinelands culture, in helping to preserve the Pinelands," said Cutts, 44. He’s a fourth-generation cranberry grower at Cutts Brothers cranberry farm in Bass River Township.
His favorite way to consume the state beverage contender? With ginger ale.
Amy Howell studies cranberries at Chatsworth’s Philip E. Marucci Center for Blueberry and Cranberry Research and Extension, a substation of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station of Rutgers University.
An emerging area of cranberry research that Howell says could have worldwide implications is the use of cranberry for the suppression of H. pylori bacteria, which causes ulcers and can lead to stomach cancer. She says studies have also shown that cranberry can aid probiotic activity in the gut.
Long before farmers were cultivating the fruit for market and bartenders were pouring the juice into cocktail shakers, cranberries served multiple purposes in daily life.
“They have such interesting historical roots here, dating back to Native American times,” Howell says.
Prior to the advent of cranberry research for urinary health, the Lenni-Lenape would collect the berries at riverbanks and use them to treat urinary disorders or grind them up and put them on their skin as a poultice to prevent infection. They would also pound the berries into deer meat, which acted as a preservative in the making of pemmican, a mix of protein and fat that served as a food source in winter.
"Those of us who live in New Jersey, especially in the Pine Barrens, you can find wild cranberries growing right on the rivers,” Howell says. “These things have been around in our state here for hundreds of years, if not longer.”
Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
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