The Red Rose Whispers of ...
News: Our correspondent's frustrating, but ultimately enlightening, search for an organic Valentine's Day rose.
February 10, 2003
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Roses, America's favorite symbol of love, are flooding into florists' shops and markets across the country this Valentine's week. Last year, we bought more than 120 million of the blooms, and this year promises to be no different. But, while the 19th century Irish-American writer John Boyle O'Reilly declared that a red rose "whispers of passion," the roses being sold to passionate Americans whisper of something quite different -- pesticides and herbicides and fungicides that can pose serious health risks for greenhouse workers.
Perhaps it is the unquestioned beauty and innocence of roses that allow them to sneak in and out of supermarkets and florists without even the most discriminating of consumers ever pondering where they're from or how they're grown. It seemed that way one recent day at the Whole Foods Market in San Francisco, where a stunning display of peach-, salmon-, and cream-colored roses bore none of the store's ubiquitous store-lingo labeling of 'organic,' 'transitional,' or 'conventional,' much less any information about where they were grown.
Judging from their thick stems and baseball-sized bulbs, I guessed that the blooms on display at Whole Foods could only be from the Ecuadorian Andes, where long days, high altitude and volcanic soils help growers to produce about 650 million roses each year for sale in the United States. A store employee confirmed by suspicion. And she explained that the Ecuadorian roses were, in Whole Foods lingo, 'conventional.'
My objective was to find a truly organic rose, a rose perfect not only in appearance but in upbringing too. These Ecuadorian roses weren't likely to fit the bill. Ecuador's greenhouse industry may be booming, but the country's flower growers are paying the price. Thanks to lax pesticide controls, nearly 60 percent of post-harvest workers in Ecuador complain of headaches, blurred vision, muscular twitching and other symptoms of pesticide poisoning, according to studies by the International Labor Organization and other groups.
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| | Pesticides, with Love We tested two batches of Ecuadorian roses purchased at two locations in San Francisco. While the test is by no means a scientific sampling of roses available across the country, the results are an indication of the types of chemicals greenhouse workers in Ecuador are exposed to. Pesticides are broken into several families, three of which were found on the roses tested. Organophosphate chemicals, of which WWII-era nerve gas is an example, affects the nervous system of insects and humans by disrupting neurotransmitters. Carbamates also disrupt neurotransmitters, but they break down faster and their effects are usually reversible. Organochlorine pesticides, of which DDT and chlordane are examples, are often carcinogenic and accumulate over time in body fat. | ||
| Sample 1 | ||||
| Organophosphate: | Dimethoate | |||
| Carbamates: | None Detected | |||
| Organochlorines: | Captan, Bravo, Tedion | |||
| Sample 2 | ||||
| Organophosphate: | None Detected | |||
| Carbamates: | Aldicarb | |||
| Organochlorines: | Captan, Iprodione, Procymidone | |||
| What's What Dimethoate - insecticide used to kill spiders and a variety of insects. Sources: US EPA Pesticide Backgrounder, US EPA Integrated Risk Information System. | ||||
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"You're not going to eat those products,'' said Fred Crowder, deputy agricultural commissioner for California's Marin County. "And exposure through dermal contact is not going to happen unless you're a worker in Ecuador handling these flowers all the time.'' While Americans concerned about what they eat have pushed organic foods firmly into the mainstream, few in the US seem sufficiently concerned about greenhouse workers in a foreign country to create a demand for organic flowers.
With that depressing thought in mind, I woke at 4 a.m. the next day and made my way to the San Francisco Flower Mart, the wholesale center through which around two million roses will pass this Valentine's season. I wandered for hours in search of an organic rose, unwrapping cellophane, querying flower merchants and examining labels. It was not until well after sunrise, as I pawed through a motley assortment of roses, that I found a bunch wrapped in plastic, upon which were printed the enigmatic words 'www.organicbouquet.com.'
My search was over, but I was still unsatisfied. I wondered aloud about the lack of fanfare for this product, which I had come to consider almost revolutionary.
"Most of the customers ask us why we even have organic roses,'' shrugged Robert Ruggeri, co-owner of Silver Terrace Nurseries, the shop where I found the roses. "We say 'well it's a niche' and people ask us 'what for?'"
Gerald Prolman, co-founder of Organic Bouquet in Novato, Calif., answered the phone on the first ring, and his story made my hunt sound easy. He explained that it took him two years to find a commercially available organic rose.
"I searched organic certification agencies around the globe," Prolman said. "No one was making roses.'' So Prolman flew to Ecuador, where rose growers were already reeling from a series of European boycotts and "green-label" programs designed to encourage better labor and environmental practices in the greenhouses. He tracked down the country's biggest advocate for organic flowers, Hernan Chiriboga of BioGarden, and convinced him to go a step further by using organic, not chemical, fertilizers. After American inspectors visited Chiriboga's greenhouses and gave them the stamp of approval, BioGarden shipped the first organic roses to the U.S. last October -- the same month that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's national organic labeling standards took effect.
Chiriboga's initial effort at organic growing is limited to only three acres of brand-new greenhouses built on virgin soil never exposed to pesticides. But Prolman says other rose producers in Ecuador have expressed interest. The challenge now, he says, is to create a US market for the pesticide-free roses.
"You have to have everyone committed at the same time,'' says Prolman, who co-found the Made in Nature organic produce company in the late 80's and whose business partner is Dave Smith, of Smith & Hawken fame.
Some of America's biggest green retailers seem to think that Prolman might be onto something. Organic Bouquet has signed small deals with eco-friendly supermarket chains such as Wild Oats, Trader Joe's and the Southern Californian division of Whole Foods.
Paul Sansone, an Oregon-based farmer who is considered the leading organic flower expert in the country, says it's about time that American consumers realized organic need not apply only to food.
"Are we so self-centered that we only care what goes into our own mouth?" Sansone asked. "Haven't we evolved to the point where we can see that what we put into the environment affects everyone?"
Sansone grows his flowers according to a super-strict form or organic farming laid out by Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner in the 1920's. As another sign that organic flowers are catching on, Sansone says his 30-acre operation is about to grow by a factor of ten after a neighbor owning 300 acres of surrounding land purchased Sansone's business and retained him as a consultant. Sansone says attitudes have come a long way since the late 80's, when buyers were downright wary of organic flowers.
"My wholesalers blamed us for insects in their cooler,'' says Sansone. "So we stopped talking about it.'' Now, he says, the stigma has been lifted and organic growers may finally be finding their niche. "It wasn't until Organic Bouquet that anyone cared,'' Sansone says. "My flowers just disappeared into the product stream.''
Still, no American farmer has dared jump into the organic rose business. Not even Sansone, who says the closest he gets is specialty products like rose hips used in floral arrangements. And the consumer jury is out on the first batch of 75,000 organic Ecuadorian roses that will begin popping up at specialty floral shops and supermarkets across the nation this Valentine's week.
Wild Oats is sending a bucket of the blooms to each of its 78 stores across the country in time for Valentine's Day, along with signs explaining their environmental benefits. But company spokeswoman Sonja Tuitele admits that, at this point, demand for organic roses is small -- even among the store's eco-aware customers.
"It's slow on the take with consumers,'' she says. "We need to do a better job at the store level about educating people about the benefit of organic flowers."
Image: Sarah Kehoe
