kalikshama
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A classic example of what's wrong with our industrial food system. (And if you don't care about the tomatoes, what about the workers?!?)
How the modern day tomato came to be
In the sultry summer heat, there are few flavors more welcome than that of a burstingly fresh, sloppy, sweet, tangy, locally grown tomato. In the winter, though, their grocery store equivalent is barely recognizable as the same fruit. They're hard, uniformly round and almost inevitably taste-free.
They're also mostly trucked in from Florida, where they're grown in some challenging agricultural conditions, and where the industry has come under scrutiny for their labor practices.
Barry Estabrook, author of 'Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit' spoke with Eatocracy about this came to be.
Eatocracy: How did you become invested in telling the story of the modern day tomato?
Estabrook: I became interested in tomatoes when I was in fact attacked by a group of tomatoes. I was driving down an interstate highway in Southwestern Florida and come up behind what I thought at first was a gravel truck. As I got closer, I saw what I took for Granny Smith apples - and I thought, "Those don't grow in Florida." When I got really close, I saw it was full of bright green tomatoes. No pink - just green.
I was mesmerized, and then the truck hit a bump. Three tomatoes came flying off and nearly went through my windshield. I noticed that they hit the pavement on I-75, bounced and then rolled into the ditch.
They didn't shatter, they didn't splatter; they stayed intact. I thought, "My God! What have they done to this wonderful fruit?"
Eatocracy: Are these the same round, red tomatoes that we see in grocery stores?
Estabrook: Winter tomatoes that we get in our grocery stores and in fast food places are picked when they're bright green. Any hint of coloration is treasonous in a Florida tomato field in the winter. The industry says they're "mature green" and supposedly might develop flavor, but there's no way the pickers can tell the difference between mature and immature.
These green tomatoes are taken back to a warehouse, packed in boxes, which are stacked on pallets and moved into storage areas where they're exposed to ethylene gas. The gas forces the tomatoes to turn the right color; it doesn't ripen them.
Eatocracy: Does this account for the lack of flavor in the modern day tomato?
Estabrook: There are two factors at work here. The first is that the tomatoes are picked when they're immature and no matter what you do, an immature tomato will never get any taste; though it might look alluring.
The second problem with industrial tomatoes is that for the last fifty years, they've been bred for one thing only, and that's yield. One farmer told me, "I get paid per pound. I don't get paid a cent for taste." Sadly, he was right.
Eatocracy: Why are consumers willing to put up with this?
Estabrook: I came across study after study that showed that tomatoes rank at or near the bottom of consumers' satisfaction lists. All I can guess is that grocery store tomatoes are food porn - in the literal sense. It looks pretty, it triggers memories, but it certainly doesn't deliver.
Eatocracy: What are the challenges to growing tomatoes in a climate like Florida?
Estabrook: I quickly learned that from a botanical and horticultural point of view, you would have to be a fool to try to grow tomatoes commercially in a place like Florida.
The main problem is that tomatoes' ancestors come from desert areas. They're adapted to extremely dry, low-humidity areas. That's why Southern Italy and parts of California are so good for tomatoes; it doesn't rain all summer. Florida is notoriously humid, which is just perfect conditions for all of the funguses, rusts, blights, insects and pests that destroy tomatoes.
That's why they have to use 110 different chemicals, fertilizers, fungicides and herbicides to even get a crop. Florida and California grow about the same amount of tomatoes. Florida uses eight times to get the same agricultural product.
The second problem with Florida is - I'm not even going to call it soil, because it isn't. Florida tomatoes are grown in sand. Just like the sand on Daytona Beach, it's great to wiggle your toes in, but it contains zero nutrients. None.
So they have to essentially pump in all the chemical food that the plant is going to need for its lifetime. Then they seal the row in plastic and hope they'll get a crop.
Eatocracy: Then what's the rationale behind growing tomatoes in Florida?
Estabrook: It has nothing to do with horticulture and everything to do with marketing. Florida is a day and a half or two days semi-trailer load from Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia - from two thirds of the country. And in the wintertime, they can get a crop.
That's the reason they're grown there. It’s the antithesis of local and seasonal.
Eatocracy: How do these tomatoes physically get from the field to the plate?
Estabrook: They've not invented a machine that can pick a tomato that's going to be sliced and eaten fresh. Canning tomatoes can be picked by machine; they may as well be apples and oranges. People have to do pick these by hand, and they're paid on a piece basis, by bucket of tomatoes.
You see these people out in the field, with bushel-basket sized buckets between their legs. It looks like one of those cartoon dogs digging, except that instead of dirt coming up, it's tomatoes. Their hands are pulling and pulling and pulling until they fill a bucket, which they run over to a nearby truck and empty it.
Eatocracy: Who are the workers?
Estabrook: They are primarily people from Southern Mexico, Northern Central America, Guatemala. United Farm Workers estimate that 70 percent of all farm workers in this country, not just tomato pickers, are undocumented immigrants.
Eatocracy: What are their working conditions like?
Estabrook: Slavery is what is happening. There is no way to gloss it. You can't say "slavery-like." You can't say "near-slavery." "Human trafficking" doesn't even do it credit. Here are some things that are in court records; it's all been proven.
People are being bought and sold like chattels. People are locked and shackled in chains at night in order to prevent them from escaping. People are being beaten severely if they're too tired to work, too sick to work or don't want to work hard enough. People are beaten even more severely or murdered if they try to escape. They receive little or no pay for their efforts.
That, to me, is slavery. It's like 1850, not 2011.
Eatocracy: How does a worker end up in this situation?
Estabrook: First of all, there have been 1,200 slaves freed in seven separate prosecutions in Florida in the last 15 years. The way that they get into slavery is often a slippery slope.
I talked to one guy who'd just crossed the border and hit the town of Immokalee, Florida. He was homeless and staying at a mission. He was standing outside and a guy pulled up in a pickup truck and said, "Hey, want work? I'll pay you?" and he named a price that was twice the going rate."
The man told him, "My mother cooks for the crew, and we'll just deduct that from your check, and you can even stay on my property; I've got some buildings. We'll just take that from your check."
This all sounded good, but you know what happens. Even though he picked enough tomatoes to supposedly get out of debt to his boss, he was never told that.
Everything cost money. It even cost him $5 to hose himself off with a backyard hose every day. There was plenty of liquor supplied at a very high price. He was kept enslaved for two and a half years before he broke out.
Eatocracy: How did he say he broke free?
Estabrook: This is telltale of the conditions they live under. He and three or four other slaves had been locked for the night in the back of the produce truck that was going to go out in the fields the next day. There was no toilet or running water.
As dawn broke, they noticed that there was a little gap between the rivets. He got on the shoulders of another man and they punched and kicked their way through the roof. He slid down the side of the truck and got a ladder so they rest of them could crawl out and run to safety.
Eatocracy: Have there been any health concerns for the workers?
Estabrook: Florida tomatoes can be sprayed with more than 100 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides. Some of them are what the Environmental Protection Agency calls "acutely toxic" - which is a nice way of saying they can kill you. The containers come with skulls and crossbones.
I talked to three or four dozen tomato workers during the course of my research and I'd ask them if they'd ever been sprayed. It was like asking them if they put their pants on one leg at a time. They'd say, "Of course! It happens every day." It's illegal, but it happens. Florida tomatoes have to be sprayed regularly or they'll die because of all the insects and diseases there.
Most workers now are first generation Hispanic, so they know there have been short term effects.
Eatocracy: Have there been more long-term cases studied?
Estabrook: Years ago, the workers were African American, and they didn't migrate - they stayed put.
Read more: http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2011/09/08/how-the-modern-day-tomato-came-to-be/
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RE: Food safety ? - 
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