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adderbolt - Jack posted an update Thursday, Oct 27, 2011, 11:04pm EDT, 14 years ago
You Say Tomato and I Say Tomato
Book Review by Reenie Rogers
It’s hardly news that tomatoes sold in grocery stores are mostly tasteless. And it’s barely news that migrant field workers who come to work in Florida, often find themselves working under terrible conditions. Author Barry Estabrook's book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit [ISBN: 9781449401092] is a riveting tale. Tomatoland is a place of greed and cruelty that’s barely believable.
Estabrook, an investigative food journalist was inspired to write Tomatoland because of two questions he had.
1. Why can’t modern agribusiness deliver a decent tasting tomato?
2. Why can’t today’s tomato be as nutritious as the tomato grown in the 1960s?
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, today’s tomato has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than the fruit of the 1960s. One nutrient that today’s tomato has more of is sodium: 14 times as much.Estabrook traveled to the tomato fields in southwest Florida to see how tomatoes are grown. Tomatoland is a page-turner. Heroes and villains are alive in the fields of Florida’s tomato agribusiness. Top villains include Ag Mart Produce, Inc.; the Florida Tomato Committee; various cruel and abusive field bosses, and those involved in human trafficking.
Field bosses berate, beat, punish, and cheat their laborers, many of whom cannot speak or read English. They force them to stay in the fields even while pesticides are being applied, without respirators or appropriate clothing. Pregnant workers must to stay and work and be exposed to chemicals known to disrupt fetal development.
Tomato field workers often come from other countries illegally, [Hispanic, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrants] with promises of housing and good wages. What they too often find are dilapidated trailers and cruel bosses. The heroes in Tomatoland include the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) who strive to end farm worker abuses, and other people who risk their lives to help fellow workers.
Florida tomatoes, at the center of the story, are bred to withstand the journey from field to market. At harvest time, they are picked green, “green tomatoes so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine, At packing time, pallets of green tomatoes go into warehouses for a treatment of ethylene gas which turns them red and ready for the market.
Tomatoland exposes the extraordinary powers that are wielded by a group called the Florida Tomato Committee. The Committee’s concern is for the tomatoes having uniform shape, size, and yield. There is no consideration for a tomato’s taste. Further, the regulations of the Committee prohibit growers in south Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their color and shape don’t conform.
To grow Florida tomatoes, many chemicals are applied throughout the season. In Florida, 8 million pounds of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were applied to tomatoes grown in 2006. California used 1 million pounds to grow the same amount of tomatoes. The Sunshine State might be better called the “Pesticide State.
Estabrook also offers success stories of unique individuals doing large-scale growing of organic tomatoes. While these offer hope, the distressing images in the other fields does not easily fade. One cannot help but contrast the humane farms with farms where slavery, birth defects, workers soaked with pesticides, and bosses cheating workers of their hard-earned wages, occurs.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs appears to have poor oversight. The horrors play out in the tomato fields unbeknownst to consumers who wouldn’t imagine that the tomatoes in their sandwiches, and salads were grown under such sad conditions. One third of all tomatoes sold in the United States from October to June come from Florida.
A reader’s trip through Tomatoland proves that this is a dreary business that needs to be closed for good. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a giant beacon of hope, and a group actively helping to end abuse to farm workers. And yes, organically-grown tomatoes tended by humane growers who treat their farm workers fairly and decently is the way of the future
