Tomatoland

Tomatoes were a big part of summer life when I was growing up in Indiana. We grew them in the garden, had them for dinner every night, and canned the juice for winter. We generally didn't eat them other times of the year -- they were trucked in from Florida, and as my Uncle George in Miami always said, "Florida tomatoes just don't taste as good as Indiana ones." So I'm a big tomato fan and a sucker for any kind of story about them.


When I sat down to listen to a Talk of the Nation radio show with Barry Estabrook, the author of Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, I expected to hear about the difficulties of growing a delicious fruit that can be shipped thousands of miles and still look perfect. And I did. Estabrook talked about how slicing tomatoes (what we buy in the grocery) are picked when hard and perfectly green and then ripened with ethylene gas in warehouses. But he went on to talk about some other things -- some of which were very disturbing.

He talked about how most tomatoes in US supermarkets come from either Florida or California, and how those in the winter almost exclusively come from Florida. Combating the molds and rusts and germs and insects of Florida's humid climate requires lots of pesticides, however -- 8 times the amount needed in California's dry summer climate! Florida tomatoes are also grown in sand, and all the plant's nutrients have to be added to that sand.

What really disturbed me, though, didn't have to do with the tomatoes, themselves; it had to do with the workers picking tomatoes. Supermarket tomatoes are picked by hand, primarily by foreign workers. And in southwestern Florida, the wintertime "tomato capital" of the US, those workers are slaves.

Yes, you heard me right - slaves¹! Not even virtual slaves; they're "locked up, shackled in chains at night, locked in the back of produce trucks at night so that they're handy to be delivered to the fields in the morning, bought and sold and negotiated for almost at auction." And if they run away, they're chased down and beaten as an example to others.

According to Estabrook, "There have been more than 1,200 people freed from slavery rings in Florida agriculture in the last 10 or 15 years. Off the record an official told me recently that there's two cases currently under investigation. The problem is they're very, very hard cases to prosecute. So what you're seeing is the tip of a really ugly iceberg."

I thought Estabrook surely must be exaggerating, but Luis CdeBaca, Ambassador-at-Large and director of the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, also spoke briefly by phone on the program. He confirmed that "there still is modern slavery right here in our own backyards." Enforcement is being stepped up around the country, but what will really help is if companies know that consumers care about how their food is picked and packed.

So I care. And I suggest you do, too. Take a listen to the interview (it's linked above) and see what you think. The pesticide issue, alone, would make me want to limit consumption of conventionally-grown Florida tomatoes. But slavery ... while that problem exists, I won't be buying or eating Florida tomatoes at all!


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¹ I couldn't believe it, so I did some more research. The US now includes itself in the annual US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, and here are links to the 2010 report and the 2010 special briefing. There's not a lot of detail, but the briefing has a little more - just search on "Florida".