State: Massachusetts · Statute: None found · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
Search the internet for Massachusetts food laws and you will be told, with total confidence, that in 1939 the Commonwealth made it illegal to put tomatoes in clam chowder — and that the law remains on the books today. Radio-station listicles repeat it every chowder season. It has everything: a date, a state, a beloved dish, a crime against soup. It also has one flaw, which is that essentially nothing about it happened in Massachusetts, and the part that did happen — one state north — never became a law at all.
Massachusetts has no statute, from 1939 or any other year, governing the contents of clam chowder. Nobody in the Bay State has ever been fined, charged, or even scolded under color of law for tomatoing a chowder. The "1939" in the claim is real, but it belongs to Maine — and even there, the tomato ban existed mainly as a punchline in search of a legislature.
The villain of the piece is State Representative Cleveland Sleeper Jr. of Rockland, Maine, a legislator since 1933 and a committed tomato abolitionist. For several years Sleeper had facetiously drafted bills to criminalize tomatoes in clam chowder — the New England Historical Society calls him "a tomato-hating politician," and his proposed punishment for offenders tells you everything about his intent: violators would be forced to dig a barrel of clams at high tide, a penalty that is not merely cruel but physically impossible, since the clams are underwater. It was a publicity stunt with a bill number's ambitions.
Here is the part the listicles skip: according to the Historical Society, Sleeper never even got to file his bill. The Maine Hotel Association decided to settle the chowder question at its mid-winter frolic in Portland in early 1939 — not with a vote, but with a cook-off. Sleeper brought a chef; his challenger, Philadelphia restaurateur Harry Tully, brought one too. (Some accounts say the bill was introduced in the Maine legislature before dying; the Historical Society's account has it dying of showmanship first. Either way: Maine, not Massachusetts, and dead, not law.)
The contest, covered by the Boston Globe in February and March of 1939, drew some two hundred spectators and a judging panel that included Maine's Governor Lewis O. Barrows and Ruth Wakefield, inventor of the Toll House chocolate chip cookie — Maine and Massachusetts judges only, a fact Tully's tomato chowder probably noticed. Joe DiMaggio reportedly attended to defend the tomato. It did not help. The eleven judges voted unanimously for the traditional cream-based chowder and refused to call Tully's entry chowder at all: "not a bad vegetable stew," they allowed, which in New England is a hanging verdict delivered politely.
Somewhere in the retelling, the story drifted south across one state line and hardened: a drafted bill became a passed law, a cook-off became a codification, and Maine's joke became Massachusetts' permanent record. The claim now cites itself in a perfect circle of radio websites. The Bureau's verdict: FOLKLORE — a real war, a real legislator, a real unanimous verdict on the soup, and not one word of it a Massachusetts law.
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