Tomatoland (2 page)

If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow. Tomato production in the state has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology. Florida is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest—within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck—is cold. But Florida is notoriously humid. Tomatoes’ wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on earth. Taken to Spain, Italy, and southern France in the 1500s, they thrived in the Mediterranean’s sunny, rainless summers. They flourish in the dry heat of California, home to the U.S. canned tomato industry, which is completely distinct from the fresh-market tomato industry. Canning tomatoes and fresh tomatoes may as well be apples and oranges. When forced to struggle in the wilting
humidity of Florida, tomatoes become vulnerable to all manner of fungal diseases. Hordes of voracious hoppers, beetles, and worms chomp on their roots, stems, leaves, and fruit. And although Florida’s sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. Florida growers may as well be raising their plants in a sterile hydroponic medium.
To get a successful crop
, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different
herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal. Workers are exposed to these chemicals on a daily basis. The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens, and babies born with horrendous birth defects.
Not all the chemicals stay behind
in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found
residues of thirty-five pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections.

All of this might have a perverse logic to it if tomato growing were a highly lucrative, healthy business. But it isn’t. As large as most of them are, Florida’s tomato companies are struggling, always one
disaster or disappointing year away from insolvency. Cheap tomatoes from Mexico stream across the border during the winter months. Advances in
hydroponic technology have enabled greenhouse tomatoes from Canada and the northern states to eat into Florida’s market share during the spring and fall.
The industry was nearly dealt
a fatal blow in 2008 when it suffered more than $100 million in lost sales after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration erroneously put fresh Florida tomatoes on a shortlist of suspects responsible for a massive salmonella outbreak. Growers lost a similar amount two years later when three-quarters of their plants died during a prolonged freeze. Even at the best of times, commodity tomato farming is a high-stakes gamble. When the replanted fields did eventually ripen after the 2010 cold snap, tomatoes glutted the market and prices dropped so low that it wasn’t even worthwhile for growers to harvest their crops. Millions of dollars of perfectly edible tomatoes were left to rot in the fields.

An industrial tomato grower has no control over what he spends on fuel, fertilizer (which requires enormous quantities of natural gas in its manufacture), and pesticides, but he can control what he pays the men and women who plant, tend, and harvest his crops.
This has put a steady downward pressure
on the
earnings of tomato workers. Those cheap tomatoes that fill produce sections 365 days a year, year in and year out, come at a tremendous human cost. Although there have been recent improvements, a person picking tomatoes receives the same basic rate of pay he received thirty years ago. Adjusted for inflation, a harvester’s wages have actually dropped by half over the same period. Florida tomato workers, mostly Hispanic migrants, toil without union protection and get neither overtime, benefits, nor medical insurance. They are denied basic legal rights that virtually all other laborers enjoy. Lacking their own vehicles, they have to live near the fields, often paying rural slumlords exorbitant rents to be crammed with ten or a dozen other farmworkers in moldering trailers with neither heat nor air conditioning and which would be condemned outright in any other American jurisdiction.

Paid on a “piece” basis for every bushel-sized basket they gather, tomato pickers are lucky to earn seventy dollars on a good day. But good days are few. Workers can arrive at a field at the appointed time and wait for hours while fog clears or dew dries. If it rains, they don’t pick. If a field ripens more slowly than expected, too bad. And if there is a freeze as there was in 2010, weeks can go by without work and without a penny of income. After that freeze, soup kitchens in the state’s tomato growing regions (busy enough during “good” times) saw demand exceed capacity. Charitable organizations exhausted their budgets. Unable to pay rent, pickers slept in encampments in the woods.
The owners had crop insurance
and emergency government aid to offset their losses. The workers had nothing.

And conditions are even worse
for some of the men and women in Florida’s tomato industry. In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, South Florida’s tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Molloy is not talking about virtual slavery, or near slavery, or slaverylike conditions, but real slavery. In the last fifteen years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than one thousand men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported. Workers were “sold” to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn’t feel like working or were too sick or weak to work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse. Corpses of murdered farmworkers were not an uncommon sight in the rivers and canals of South Florida. Even though police have successfully prosecuted seven major slavery cases in the state in the last fifteen years, those brought to justice were low-ranking contract field managers, themselves only one or two shaky rungs up the economic ladder from those they enslaved. The wealthy owners of the vast farms walked away scot-free. They expressed no public regrets, let alone outrage, that such
conditions existed on operations they controlled. But we all share the blame. When I asked Molloy if it was safe to assume that a consumer who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store, fast food restaurant, or food-service company in the winter has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave, he corrected my choice of words. “It’s not an assumption. It is a fact.”

After months of crisscrossing Florida, speaking with growers, trade association executives, owners of tomato-packing companies, lawyers, federal prosecutors, county sheriffs, university horticulturalists, plant breeders, farmworker advocates, soup kitchen managers, field workers, field crew leaders, fair housing advocates, one U. S. senator, and one Mexican peasant who came here seeking a better life for his family only to be held for two years as a slave, I began to see that the Florida tomato industry constitutes a parallel world unto itself, a place where many of the assumptions I had taken for granted about living in the United States are turned on their heads.

In this world, slavery is tolerated, or at best ignored.
Labor protections for workers predate the Great Depression
. Child labor and minimum wage
laws are flouted. Basic antitrust measures do not apply. The most minimal
housing standards are not enforced. Spanish is the lingua franca. It has its own banking system made up of storefront paycheck-cashing outfits that charge outrageous commissions to migrants who never stay in one place long enough to open bank accounts. Food is supplied by
tiendas
whose inventory is little different from what you’d find in a dusty village in Chiapas, only much more expensive. An unofficial system of buses and minivans supplies transportation. Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical application. All of this is happening in plain view, but out of sight, only a half-hour’s drive from one of the wealthiest areas in the United States with its
estate homes, beachfront condominiums, and gated golf communities. Meanwhile, tomatoes, once one of the most alluring fruits in our culinary repertoire, have become hard green balls that can easily survive a fall onto an interstate highway. Gassed to an appealing red, they inspire gastronomic fantasies despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a world we’ve all made, and one we can fix. Welcome to Tomatoland.

ROOTS

A
Chilean soldier was guarding
a lonely garrison in the
Atacama Desert near the Peruvian border when the American tomato geneticist
Roger Chetelat and his field research team arrived. The sentry obligingly provided what should have been straightforward directions to their destination: Follow the road beside the railroad tracks. As an afterthought, he quietly suggested that they be careful not to stray from the road, adding with a knowing nod, “land mines.”

Chetelat, an athletic fifty-three-year-old, could be mistaken for a high school gym teacher. In fact he is the director of the prestigious
C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at the University of California Davis, the world’s foremost repository of wild tomato plants and their seeds. On that day in the desert, Chetelat and his group, which included scientists from the
Universidad de Chile in Santiago, had been retracing a trail that had been cold for fifty years, its route filed away in the records of a Chilean herbarium. With luck—lots of it—the stale information might lead them to a few remote clumps of a wild tomato species called
Solanum chilense
. If the team was successful, seeds from those plants, which had never before
been collected in that area, would become a valuable addition to the center’s collection.

But that was a big “if.” First, there were questions concerning the accuracy of the pre-GPS location, given as simply “kilometer 106-108” on the cog railway that switch-backed through the Andes between Chile’s port city Arica and La Paz, Bolivia. The notation had been scrawled in the journal of a British collector sometime in the 1950s. Even if the directions were valid, a lot can happen in a half-century to an isolated cluster of plants. Roads get built. Gas pipelines go through. Settlements grow. Fields expand. Animals browse. Facing the distinct possibility that they were on botany’s version of the wild goose chase, the researchers had been driving across the desert since dawn and had yet to see anything resembling a wild tomato.

The Atacama Desert makes up
the southernmost part of the geographic range of modern tomatoes’ wild ancestors, which still grow in parts of western Chile,
Peru, and
Ecuador (and the
Galapagos Islands, home to two errant species). It is a testament to the adaptability of the tomato clan that its members can survive in the Atacama, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The gravelly, boulder-strewn landscape is fifty times as dry as California’s Death Valley. Some parts have not received a drop of rainfall in recorded history. Chetelat has driven across its surface for an entire day without seeing a single living thing. Most of the plants that survive there are low and scrubby and, during the driest months, brown and to all appearances, dead.

Chetelat was further discouraged when the road they had been told to follow diverged from the rail line several kilometers before they reached their goal. Frustrated but still determined, the driver veered onto the tracks, which were still occasionally used, and bounced and jolted along until that became too uncomfortable. Still well short of the marker, the scientists set out on foot, even though it was getting late in the day and no one wanted to bivouac in a semi-militarized no-man’s-land. It didn’t help that they had not seen a tomato. Until they
arrived at kilometer 108, that is. There, just as described, with yellow flowers glowing in the afternoon light, were
S. chilense
, descendants of the plants seen by the 1950s collector. The researchers’ reward for a long, uncomfortable session in the field was a handful of seeds not much bigger than grains of sand. Chetelat considered it a good day.

If you enjoy tomatoes, it was a good day for you, too. Their field work in many ways echoes the expeditions of those quirky Victorian naturalists who scoured the globe to add botanical curiosities to their collections. But were it not for the efforts of Chetelat and his predecessors and colleagues at the Rick Center to find and conserve all seventeen species that make up the tomato family, there is a very real possibility that tomato production as we know it today would not exist.

Of all the species that played a part in the great
Columbian Exchange—the widespread mingling of plants, animals, and disease organisms between the Eastern and Western hemispheres following the establishment of Spanish colonies in the New World—the tomato surely would have topped the list as the least likely to succeed, never mind to become
one of our favorite vegetables
. Botanists think that the modern tomato’s immediate predecessor is a species called
S. pimpinellifolium
that still grows wild in the coastal deserts and Andean foothills of Ecuador and northern Peru. Inauspicious and easily overlooked, S.
pimpinellifolium
fruits are the size of large garden peas. They are red when ripe and taste like tomatoes, but picking a handful of the diminutive fruits as a snack would take several minutes. Gathering enough for a salad or salsa wouldn’t be worth anybody’s effort.