You’ve probably noticed the absence of Carrots in your boxes lately. Carrots are one of our most popular vegetable items, and we have developed quite a following for them over the years. In order to have carrots ready to harvest in the fall, we have to plant them in mid-summer. Unfortunately, the tiny seedlings are very sensitive and this year’s off-the-charts heat in June and July literally cooked our carrots while they were still tiny.
We got a window of cooler weather in early August that allowed us to get a good “stand” of carrots, and those finally sized up enough to start harvesting this week just before the rain started. So our big CSA news for this week is that you’re getting carrots for the first time in months.
Unfortunately, carrots also made the national news this week, in the worst possible way. If you haven’t already heard, there is a nationwide recall of Grimmway Farms fresh and “baby carrots” due to a widespread reporting of food-borne illness from E. Coli connected to them. Dozens of people have become ill and one person has died.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that carrots have been implicated in a food-borne illness outbreak. That in itself is an indicator of how generally safe carrots are, because they are often eaten raw. And the average American eats 10 lbs. of them a year — fifth on the list of most-highly consumed vegetables in the U.S. So a rough estimate would put total carrot consumption at 3.3 billion pounds per year.
Stastically speaking, carrots remain a safe and healthy food. But statistics don’t mean much when it comes to food safety. Many people will now think twice for quite a while before eating carrots again, especially raw carrots. And Grimmway Farms — the largest or second largest carrot producer in the U.S. depending on the year — will certainly see an enormous loss in business.
When a large scale food-borne illness is discovered, it sets in motion an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for food safety regulations. Outbreaks like this one are almost always connected to a large industrial food producer like Grimmway. They are not what most people would consider “a farm”, but rather a large corporation that contracts with hundreds of actual farmers to grow the carrots for them. The products are sold and shipped to distributors across the county, who sell them to retailers and restaurants, who then sell them to consumers.
Thanks to the Food Safety Modernization Act, it is now fairly easy to trace the contaminated product back to the processing plant they came from. Tracing them back to the individual field or farm where they were grown is more difficult, although not impossible. Grimmway grows carrots all over the U.S., with production moving to different areas at different times of year. None of the farms where the contaminated carrots were grown is still “in production” of carrots.,
FSMA has a complicated relationship with soil. For crops where the edible portion is above the ground, the soil itself can actually be considered a contaminant. The absurdity of this idea is infuriating to farmers, especially since it does not apply — and cannot, logically or legally — to crops like carrots, potatoes and sweet potatoes that grow below the ground. But carrots, and to some extent onions, are the only root crop that is often eaten raw.
Carrots clearly do not absorb E. Coli or any other bacteria or microbe into the roots through the soil. If they did, they would make people sick all the time and the FDA would likely require them to be cooked before eating. And while it’s possible that a carrot that is grown in contaminated soil might make someone sick if some of that soil remains on the carrots, the likeliehood of that causing a nationwide outbreak is close to zero.
Almost all carrots grown in the U.S. are washed before selling them. The water used to wash them must meet “drinking water” standards and in large operations is usually chlorinated; the wash water itself used by Grimmway was almost certainly not the source of the E. Coli. Instead, it was likely after washing, the contamination likely came during the process they use to turn full size carrots into so-called “baby carrots”. My guess is that fresh carrots, while listed as part of the recall, will not end up being implicated in making people sick.
Many people do not know that carrots do not grow into bite-sized, perfectly shaped roots of uniform size. Actual baby carrots look alot like full size carrots, but smaller. Grimmway’s “baby carrots” are in fact very large or broken carrots that are trimmed and polished by industrial machines. While that machinery is certainly cleaned on a regular basis, something likely happened that allowed E. Coli to develop somewhere inside the machinery. At that point, the machinery became a very effective vector to contaminate a large amount of product.
To make matters worse, those contaminated carrots were then placed by machinery into plastic bags that were hermetically sealed. If those bags were not kept continually refrigerated at the correct temperature, the E. Coli inside them would have had the opportunity to reproduce quickly. For what it is worth, the carrots connected to the outbreak were harvested in August — two months before the first people started getting sick from them. During that very warm time of year, some of those sealed bags of carrots might have been exposed to very warm temperatures at some point along the way to their eventual destination.
“Baby carrots” might have been a great way to make a healthy item like carrots more convenient and appealing as a ready-to-eat snack food. But this incident also shows the limits of this approach. (Why they are allowed to be called “Baby” when they are not babies is a topic for another newsletter). I believe it also shows why locally grown food is usually safer than industrial.
The Terra Firma carrots in your CSA boxes are not “baby” nor baby. They are full-sized carrots that have been washed to remove the soil on them. We test our wash water regularly, but we do not chlorinate it or use any other sterilant. But that does not mean they are “ready to eat”. You should always rinse them yourself before eating them raw, which will remove both any errant soil particles as well as any microbes which may be inhabiting the surface of the carrot.
If you have concerns about the safety of carrots right now, there is a 100% risk free way to enjoy them: cooking them. As is true with all vegetables, cooking even briefly on high heat kills any bacteria that may be present. In the case of carrots, simply dropping them in boiling water for less than a minute will also do the trick.
Whether you eat them fresh or cooked, we hope you enjoy our first Fall carrots.
Thanks,