Food writer Barry Estabrook began his research with a question: Why do so many tomatoes lack taste and nutrition? Some $5 billion worth of “perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless” tomatoes found their way into Americans’ sandwiches, salads and other dishes in 2009.
Why “can’t we walk into a supermarket in December and buy the tomato of our dreams?” he asks.
The answer lies in the world of corporate agriculture in Florida. The Florida Tomato Committee, an influential trade group, regulates the size and shape of Florida tomatoes. While Estabrook attends at length to the genetics, breeding and history of tomatoes, a central thrust of his book centers on industrial and labor relations in the agribusiness sector. The picture he paints is disturbing and depressing.
Florida, as Estabrook shows, is hardly a natural place to grow tomatoes, with sandy soil without nutrients, unpredictable and damaging weather, and an overabundance of fungal diseases and threatening insects. Mexican competition exerts heavy pressure on profit margins.
Florida growers surmount these challenges by relying upon irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides—lots of them—to produce a “green, indestructibly hard, and impeccably smooth skinned” tomato bred for a multiple-week shelf life. It turns red only after the harvest, when exposed to low concentrations of ethylene.
Growers protect profit margins by squeezing their work force, composed largely of Hispanic migrants. The hiring and management of labor has long been subcontracted to crew bosses, allowing corporate farmers “to avoid direct responsibility for day-to-day abuses.”
Those abuses, Estabrook shows, can be horrific. Crew bosses often house their migrant workers in substandard and even subhuman facilities. “Day in and day out,” farmworkers enter “poisoned fields and expose themselves to a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals.” And the subcontracting system has resurrected a particular heinous form of labor—slavery—in which migrants are beaten, imprisoned and enslaved, forcibly prevented from fleeing through sheer violence. Wage rates for up to 12 hours of backbreaking labor allow migrant fieldworkers to bring home less than $12,000 a year. They receive no paid vacations or sick benefits.
Migrant farm workers have no right to collective bargaining. The landmark National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which affirmed workers’ right to organize and afforded legal protections of that right, exempted agricultural workers from its coverage. That was a condition of its passage imposed by Southern congressmen invested in cheap farm labor and the Jim Crow racial system.
But in recent years, organizing efforts produced some tangible gains. Estabrook recounts the efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to focus attention on the industry’s widespread abuses. Over the years, they pressured law enforcement agencies to take action against forced labor and conducted a “Campaign for Fair Food” that successfully persuaded fast-food chains to pay a penny more per pound for tomatoes. Relentlessly bad publicity finally prompted the recalcitrant Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to throw in the towel in what Estabrook sees as a major victory for the Coalition’s campaign. But while some of the worst abuses have been stopped, the rights that other American workers take for granted remain elusive.
Answering his question about why contemporary tomatoes lack taste required Estabrook to enter the world of industrial agriculture, where he discovered the “tremendous human cost” of tomato production. A moving, unsettling and, at times, uplifting book, “Tomatoland” is a highly engaging, fast-paced and informative exposé in the best muckraking journalistic tradition.
