Do you have tomatoes in your garden this summer? There's a reason that so many home gardeners stick heirloom tomatoes in their gardens or in pots on the patio: corporate-farmed tomatoes are grainy, tasteless and almost bereft of nutritional value. Food writer Barry Estabrook explains the decline of this noble fruit by focusing on winter-grown Florida tomatoes in his new book. The story he tells is astonishing.
Some may remember Estabrook when he wrote an explosive piece in Gourmet magazine outlining the human slavery that has taken place in Florida's tomato industry. For the first time, a magazine written for American foodies exposed the human cost that's often paid by farm laborers.
He expands on the story in his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit . If you think reading an entire book about tomatoes is odd, the stories he tells are spellbinding and important.
The book begins with Estabrook following a truck in rural Florida that is carrying green Florida tomatoes. When the truck driver would hit a bump tomatoes would fly off of his truck; when Estabrook examined those tomatoes on the side of the road, he found the following:
The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A ten-foot drop followed by a sixty-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.
Of course, the winter Florida tomatoes are so hard because they aren't vine-ripened; they're picked green, sprayed with mineral oil to give them a shiny appearance and then gassed with ethyene to give them the familiar red color. Taste is not a consideration; the trade association for Florida's tomato growers dictate the uniform size and shape of the product and taste is not mentioned in their requirements.
Nutritional requirements are nowhere to be found, either. According to Estabrook
100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: it contains 14 times more sodium.
There's something else the modern tomato has in abundance: pesticides. Because the soil in tomato-growing regions of Florida is little more than sand and has almost no soil nutrients (and an abundance of insects and humidity-inspired blight) the fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, and some are extremely toxic. In addition, the improper spraying of these pesticides have often led to field workers being sprayed directly with these toxins and suffering tremendous health consequences, including birth defects when they have children.
The farm worker abuse doesn't stop at pesticide poisoning. The sections dealing with slave labor in Florida's tomato fields is blood-curdling.
At any given time, Malloy works on six to twelve slavery cases. Immokalee, he says, is "ground zero for modern day slavery." He also says that any American who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten a fruit picked by the hands of a slave. "That's not an assumption," he told me. "That is a fact."
After this grim tale of tasteless tomatoes, slave labor and poisoning Estabrook highlights a few positive trends, including the building of clean, affordable housing for the farm workers and those who are trying to buck the trend of tasteless agribusiness tomatoes by starting small organic farm operations. Still, there's a long way to go and perhaps his advice to consumers will be the only change agent:
At a lunch spot in the town where I live, a handwritten notation appeared on the blackboard listing the daily specials one June afternoon. "Dear Customers, we will not be putting tomatoes on our sandwiches until we can obtain ones that meet our stands. Thanks." With that small insurrection, the restaurant's proprietor had articulated a philosophy that more of us should embrace: Insist on eating food that meets our standards only, not the standards set by corporate agriculture.
The writing in this book is excellent and the information is absorbing. Highly recommend it for a good summer read.
Finally, as you have a 4th of July cookout, stop and give thanks as you put a tomato slice on your burger to the people who picked it. Some of them have paid, quite literally, with their lives.