Conscious Choice: Pretty Toxic

May 2006

Pretty Toxic

A look inside a rose greenhouse reveals the ugly side of beautiful flowers

By Matthew Heller

Shortly after Jean Harper began working as a “plant care technician” for a Richmond, Ind., rose grower, a supervisor handed her a half-gallon plastic jug of concentrate. She poured the liquid into the tank while the supervisor added water, creating the frothy mixture that would be sprayed on roses in the greenhouses.

She read the label on the jug “out of idle curiosity,” she relates in her book, Rose City, A Memoir of Work.

The label said “Triforine,” and was accompanied by a skull and crossbones and the all-capitalized warning, “DANGER! IRREVERSABLE EYE DAMAGE! WILL CAUSE BLINDNESS! CORROSIVE!”

It was at that moment that Harper realized what she had gotten herself into. “I was like, ‘Holy shit! I could get hurt,’” recalled Harper, now an assistant professor of English at Indiana University East.

Before she took her minimum-wage job with E.G. Hill Inc. in 1992, Harper was no different from most consumers of cut roses — awed by their beauty, but completely ignorant of the details of their production. “I was not aware at all” of the pesticide dangers, she said. At Hill’s, workers wore only minimal protective clothing as they drenched roses with insect- and mildew-fighting chemicals. These days, many U.S. growers are practicing less toxic “integrated pest management” methods. But this Mother’s Day, Americans will buy more roses than on any holiday other than Valentine’s Day — and most of the flowers will come from South America, from growers who rely on pesticides long banned in the United States.

Of the 1.25 billion roses sold in the U.S. in 2003, slightly more than 90 percent came from overseas, mostly Colombia and Ecuador. The rising tide of cheap imports helped reduce the number of growers in California, the leading rose-producing state, from 53 to 36 between 2000 and 2004. Production declined by a third during the same period and the value of wholesale sales dropped 28 percent to $41.5 million. According to a spokeswoman for the California Association of Flower Growers and Shippers, another northern Monterey County rose grower recently closed its greenhouses.

Harper’s book, published by Mid-List Press in Minneapolis, is not an Upton Sinclair-style muckraker or an undercover exposé in the mold of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. The book juxtaposes her working life in the greenhouse with her escape from a failing marriage into a new relationship. But still, in its understated, lyrical way, Harper’s book is undoubtedly a missive fired at the numbing, near-paralyzing reality of factory labor, as well as an appeal for the plight of her greenhouse co-workers, many of whom seemed almost oblivious to protecting themselves from the pesticides they worked with.

“People in [the Midwest] have worked in factories for generations,” Harper mused. “You have a kind of passive attitude toward your own destiny. While you’re on the job, you’re not a person anymore. You’re part of the machine. You don’t think of the consequences of what you’re doing.”

With her graduate-level college education, Harper never expected to end up a cog in the wheel. But after leaving her husband in Massachusetts and moving to Richmond, where she had obtained her master’s degree at Emerson College, she was desperate for a job. “I wanted this job with roses because I wanted to do the work,” she recalled in the book. “I had to be in this world of plants and light and profound heat.”

As part of a small crew of technicians, she worked seven days a week, but, like her colleagues, was officially a part-timer limited to fewer than 2,000 hours a year. That meant no health insurance, paid vacation or any other benefits. Every day, the crew trudged up and down the greenhouses cutting roses, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

The timing of the cut is crucial because a rose, once it’s reached its peak, presents only a small window of opportunity for harvest. Under EPA rules in effect at the time, a rose worker could not reenter the greenhouse for as long as 12 to 24 hours after a pesticide treatment without full protective gear — a bulky uniform which rendered cutting extremely awkward. The reentry rule could wipe out two potential harvests, so at E.G. Hill, Harper’s supervisor ignored it, saying, as Harper recalled, that he “didn’t see any sense in what he called this ‘waitin’ foolishness.’”

While applying pesticide herself, Harper experienced watery eyes and nagging headaches. The spray would run down her sleeves, creating a burning sensation on her skin. Harper’s concerns only increased after management asked her to research whether pesticides posed a risk to the unborn child of a pregnant employee.

“The more you know, the more paranoid you are about pesticides,” she said. But when she admonished one worker for not wearing a respirator while he was spraying weeds with a herbicide related to Agent Orange, he told her, “If I wore a respirator, I couldn’t smoke, could I?”

Harper quit the rose factory after four months to work for a local newspaper as a copy editor. “The greenhouse saved me from an ordinary life,” she wrote. “Even now, more than a decade later, I take nothing for granted.” Unable to compete with foreign rose growers, E.G. Hill stopped producing roses in 1994. Now, all that’s left of its greenhouse complex is the smokestack of the boiler-room.

Organic Roses

Some growers around the country have switched to organic farming, but their production costs are so high that they generally cater only to the high-end, specialty markets. “You can get a dozen roses for 10 bucks [from overseas suppliers],” Harper noted. “It’s kind of the Wal-Mart effect.” Organically grown flowers, meanwhile, are far pricier and more difficult to find. And whereas consumers are less likely to mind the cosmetic flaws in organic produce, “When you’re looking at flowers, that’s the whole thing,” observes Peggy Dillon of the California Cut Flower Commission. “We don’t want petals that have holes in them.”

But before making a choice based on cosmetic concerns alone, consider the un-pretty source of your blooms. Growers in South America operate largely free of regulatory oversight. Colombian flower workers are repeatedly forced to reenter greenhouses as few as one or two hours after pesticide treatment, according to one researcher. Of some 130 pesticides approved for use in Colombia, about 20 percent are banned, severely restricted or unregistered in the U.S. or Europe.

The imported roses so many Americans will gift their mothers this month may well display the telltale white specks of pesticide residue on the petals. EPA researchers have detected a dozen different pesticides in tests on many different types of commercial cut flowers, but the industry claims there is no evidence that the residues could be harmful to consumers.

Harper, who has remarried and still lives in Richmond, hasn’t gotten over her close encounters with Triforine and the other pesticides she used in the greenhouse.

“I really wish,” she said, “that the American consumer would be more conscious of how a product is produced, where it’s produced and what are the effects of its production.”

Matthew Heller is a Los Angeles-based journalist. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly and New Times.

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