1989 Chilean grape scare

The Chilean grape scare was a 1989 incident involving two grapes from Chile found tainted with cyanide after a threat made by phone to the US Embassy in Santiago. No additional contaminated fruit was found, but the United States Food and Drug Administration banned the import of Chilean fruit and warned people not to eat grapes or Chilean fruit after investigators found traces of cyanide in some seedless red grapes shipped from Chile to Philadelphia.

The scare

The individual who telephoned the U.S. embassy in Santiago on March 2 told them some Chilean grapes contained cyanide. Just two grapes were found to have been injected with cyanide 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^{[citation needed]} in Philadelphia, scared millions of Americans.

References

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