Dubious Roots : Down-to-Earth Battle Pits Slender, Market Carrots Against Stubby, Organic Ones

Call it the Great Rainbow Organic Carrot Caper.

It has rattled a family-owned fruit and vegetable packing business in Rainbow, in northern San Diego County, and has sent ripples of suspicion to health food store owners up and down California and into Oregon who say they are worried that they’ve got tainted carrots on their shelves.

It’s a brouhaha over whether the organic carrots packed for distribution by Pacific Organics, of Rainbow, are really organic.

The controversy started last week when a Cardiff woman investigated a complaint from a health food store owner who was suspicious that the carrots he bought from Pacific Organics were not grown organically. They just didn’t look right, he said.

The woman, Claris Ritter, who works for a much larger organic fruit and vegetable broker in Los Angeles, made an unannounced visit to Pacific Organics, where she said she found discarded carrot bags bearing the name and logo of a grower in Central California who decidedly does not grow organic carrots.

It looked to her, Ritter said, that regularly grown carrots were being taken out of their original shipping bags and being repacked into Pacific Organics’ packing containers and being promoted as organic.

Ritter, the editor of a newsletter published by her employer, Albert’s Organics, said she called her boss and California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a trade group representing and promoting about half the state’s organic growers.

The CCOF, ever concerned that a bad apple--or carrot--might spoil the image of the fledgling organic farming industry, then contacted inspectors from the state Department of Health Services’ food and drug office, since organic growers fall under state guidelines.

And, on Thursday, a state investigator from the San Diego office showed up at Pacific Organics for a look around.

State officials had no comment later in the

day about the status of the investigation or whether it had been determined whether the carrots were organically grown.

But for his part, Pacific Organics owner Carroll McNab insists that his carrots are indeed organic because the farmers who grow the carrots say so.

“Once a year I interview every grower,” he said. “We ask them what they have done and not done, and certain questions about their growing habits, so we can determine if they’re qualified (as organic). With one exception, all my farmers have informed me all their products are organic or transitional organic,” meaning the particular growing field is being weaned off chemicals.

1 Non-Organic Product

The only non-organic products sold by him, McNab said, are lavender gems, a type of tangerine.

McNab said his farmers bring their fruit and vegetables to his packing house in all sorts of bags and containers, and that his job is to repack them for distribution.

He said he could answer no other questions by order of his attorney, since “there are state and federal agencies investigating possible misconduct on (others’) parts.”

Ritter said the bags she found discarded in Pacific Organics’ dumpsters were from Mike Yurosek & Son, a major California grower and distributor of carrots. A spokesman for Mike Yurosek & Son said Thursday that the company does not grow organic carrots--nor does it sell carrots of any sort to Pacific Organics. He said he had no idea how bags from his firm ended up in Rainbow.

Spokesmen for the organic farmers’ trade group, meanwhile, say they are not convinced that Pacific Organics is guilty of anything, but wanted to act on the complaint in order to preserve the young industry’s reputation.

“We want customers to feel confident in what they’re buying. That’s why we want to make sure the industry as a whole is clean,” said Bill Brammer, president of CCOF who himself farms about 30 acres of organic fruit and vegetables east of Rancho Santa Fe.

“We’ve put this in bureaucratic hands,” he said. Investigators should be able to resolve the controversy, he said, by tracking the paper trail. Standards and regulations for organic farming are governed by the state.

How does a consumer tell whether a carrot is organic?

“They look a little funkier,” said Ritter, the organic farming newsletter editor from Cardiff. “They’re not as long and tapered and clean. Organic carrots usually are shorter, fatter, stubbier.”

Maybe so, maybe not. CCOF executive director Robert Scowcroft said some organic carrot growers have developed “state-of-the-art carrots” that closely resemble the traditional, long-and-slender carrot found in the produce bins of supermarkets.

‘You Can’t Really Tell’

“You can’t really tell by looking at them if they’re organic or not,” he said. And, although an individual test of an individual carrot could show traces of chemicals, the surest way of knowing is by inspecting the farm where the carrots are grown.

The Associated Press reported that a number of health food stores in Northern California and Oregon had pulled Pacific Organics’ products off the shelves until the matter is resolved.

Several San Diego County health food stores contacted by The Times, however, said they don’t buy from Pacific Organics.

A sales clerk at Casady’s Whole Foods Market in Encinitas said, however, that such controversies aren’t too unusual. Someone accused a South Bay farmer several years ago of growing non-organic vegetables and peddling them as organic, she said, and it took an inspection of her farm to resolve the issue. The farm was organic.