Mater-Land
The New York Times July 5, 2011
That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity
By DWIGHT GARNERHow Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
By Barry Estabrook
220 pages. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.Jonathan Lethem has seen the future of agribusiness, and that future is strange. In his novel “Girl in Landscape” (1998), he imagined humans inhabiting a new planet where meals grow inside “potatoes” that can be planted and harvested. Among the flavors: meat, cake and tea. “Fish,” one character announces, as if he were Ferran Adrià, “is the weirdest one.”
South Florida, where nearly all of America’s winter tomatoes are grown, is nearly as alien an environment for farming. It’s insane that tomatoes are grown there at all, Barry Estabrook writes in his delectable and angry new book, “Tomatoland.” This volume simmers like a big, bright kettle of heirloom tomato sauce.
Mr. Estabrook’s subtitle, “How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit,” is spot-on, even if it reminds you that the only time the adjective industrial sounds nonterrifying is when it’s placed in front of “dance music.”
Why is South Florida such a grim place to grow tomatoes, the fruit we’ve agreed to accept — don’t ask, don’t tell — as a vegetable? Florida’s sandy soil, Mr. Estabrook writes, is as devoid of plant nutrients as a pile of moon rocks. “Florida growers,” he writes, “may as well be raising their plants in a sterile hydroponic medium.”
He continues, witheringly: “To get a successful crop, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal.” Migrant workers are coated with these chemicals too. The toll that’s taken on them, in the form of birth defects, cancer and other ailments, is hideous to observe and should fill those who eat Florida tomatoes with shame.
And all this for what? Hard, tasteless, uniform green balls that barely dent when they fall off a truck at 60 miles per hour and that must be gassed to achieve the sick-pink hue they present in supermarkets. It’s no wonder generations of Americans have grown up thinking tomatoes were a fraud perpetrated by God, their parents or Taco Bell. I remember biting into one of these objects in a salad and thinking: Now there’s a supposedly tasty thing I’ll never eat again.
Mr. Estabrook, who was a contributor for many years to Gourmet magazine, is a careful John McPhee-like observer of nearly every aspect of the tomato’s history and current predicament. The modern tomato’s wild ancestors came from dry, inhospitable places like western Chile, Peru and Ecuador. These tomatoes tended to be tiny, and were painstakingly bred for size as well as flavor.
The Aztecs had a recipe for salsa. (They had another festive recipe, also employing tomatoes, that included the flesh of Spanish invaders, pulled one assumes like pork shoulder.) Tomatoes arrived in Europe by the mid-16th century, and were first mentioned in an Italian cookbook in 1692.
The historical details Mr. Estabrook supplies are consistently wonderful. During the Civil War, he writes, “the Union Army left a trail of empty tomato cans in the wake of its campaigns.” He points out that Americans ate better tomatoes, from Cuba, before Fidel Castro came to power. That’s when President Kennedy placed an embargo, still in effect, on Cuban tomatoes.
“Tomatoland” is at its most potent and scathing in its portrayal of South Florida’s tomato growers and their tactics over the past half-century. It’s infuriating to read of their lack of regard for the taste of their product. Historically, when a farmer has learned to grow a tasty variety, that farmer has actually been scorned and prevented from shipping it.
“Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don’t conform to what the all-powerful Florida Tomato Committee says a tomato should look like,” Mr. Estabrook writes.
It’s far more infuriating to read of the labor practices on these farms. That pickers are exposed to pesticides is only the tip of the iceberg. “Child labor and minimum wage laws are flouted,” Mr. Estabrook writes. “The most minimal housing standards are not enforced.” Worse, he writes, actual slavery is tolerated “or at best ignored.”
The author writes: “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.”
To get at this world, he spent time with seed collectors, nutritionists, farmers, trade groups, workers and former workers, community developers. You get a sense of him shambling around in search of the weird and ugly truth, like Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” His tone is prosecutorial, but he notes the small improvement tomato companies have been forced to make in recent years.
I have a personal interest in “Tomatoland.” I spent a large chunk of my childhood in prosperous Naples, Fla., a scant half-hour — and yet a world away — from small-town Immokalee, the grim and scrubby home to Florida’s largest farmworker community. Immokalee is tomato central. Mr. Estabrook attends to reality when he writes, “Should you want to experience culture shock in one of its starkest forms, take the drive from Naples, Florida, to Immokalee.”
My mother taught for a decade in Immokalee Middle School, and regularly brought home horror stories about tomato pickers’ lives, and those of their children. I saw both sides. The family of a close high school friend owns one of the largest industrial tomato farms in Immokalee. Yet you don’t need to know this part of Florida to appreciate what Mr. Estabrook has accomplished.
“Tomatoland” is not as philosophically rich as Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” It’s not as adrenalized and slashing as Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” His book has a design flaw that slightly disfigures Mr. Pollan’s book, too, namely a fondness for a pre-industrial version of American agriculture without really explaining how small, idiosyncratic, organic farms can begin to feed the world’s hungry hordes.
But the pleasures of “Tomatoland” are real. They’re strong but subtle and sustained. Mr. Estabrook’s prose contains a mix of sweetness and acid, like a perfect homegrown tomato itself.
Stan:
With the right transition, about ten times better then industrial agriculture. This is not a pre-industrial view at all… a way of dismissing Pollan et al as reactionaries. It is very much a late-industrial/post-industrial view, grounded on the latest science.
6 July 2011, 4:57 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
Aldi’s tomatoes are pretty good. I have never seen them harvested. But, they taste like the are harvested when they are actually red. Sadly I seldom see an Aldi tomato though. First of all they are usually sold out early in the day. Second of all I seldom shop at Aldi because the lines are to long.
A documentary that I saw a few years ago outlined why these tomatoes might be endangered. The problem is that Spain is turning itself into an extension of the Sahara dessert through unsustainable water management practices. I do not understand how the Spaniards could be so blind not to have learned from the mistakes of Iranian hydroengineers or the mistakes of Russian hydroengineers before that. It is a perfect example of the saying, fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me. In Spain they are going for three.
It is apparent to me that the designers of these Florida tomatoes overlooked a key consideration when breeding tomatoes that do not bruise easily.
7 July 2011, 6:51 pmIf these tomatoes are actually thrown at someone in protest it might actually hurt to get hit by one.
Vivian Phillips:
Stan, how insane is this: [Oak Park, MI] Mother Facing Jail For Growing Veggies
http://www.care2.com/causes/mother-facing-jail-for-growing-veggies.html
How dare she not want to eat that tasteless tomato.
8 July 2011, 11:57 amStan:
This one is going on facebook. Dayam!
8 July 2011, 4:36 pmWinston Warfield:
Going to have a bumper crop of tomatoes of several varieties from my front yard, which I recently converted from faux-estate grass to vegetable garden. The compost heap we religiously add to every day (including fallen leaves in fall, chopped up with the lawnmower) is making the plants drunk with vigor; seems they grow an inch or two after a rain. I climb them up a lattice netting I installed across the front of the house, so plants can be placed very close together for intensive urban ag. You have to train them up the netting, but it’s no big deal, just requires daily checking and plant weaving. Can’t wait for harvest time later this summer/early fall. Add in lettuce (don’t plant too much, because it grows so fast you can’t keep ahead of it – but makes the neighbors happy), habanero chilis for my wife’s Trinny cooking, zukes, carrots, eggplant (don’t much care for it) and plenty of herbs, and it’s a damned edible jungle. Happy gardening.
8 July 2011, 9:55 pmStan:
You too. Headed out this morning to pick spinach, chard, cabbage leaves, cilantro, sage, basil, onions, beet greens, purslane, & green chilis. Tomatoes not ready yet, but there will be a LOT of ground cherries and slicers, from just ten plants. Carrots and beets still a ways to go. Cukes and squash coming in like gangbusters, but not pick-ready yet. Newish volunteer cantaloupes look promising too. Drought problems here, but the foot of straw around everything is preventing a lot of evaporation. I collect non-greasy kitchen scraps in a coffee can, and open holes in the straw to dump them in, so the worms can eat them. Touch of bone meal for the fruiters every week; and urine for the leafers. Cilantro, sage, and purple salvia are drawing braconoid (sp?) and ichneumenoid (sp?) wasps that have stopped all tomato hornworms and cabbage loopers in their tracks. Great pollinators, too. Nasturtiums are a pepper substitute, and they are drawing off the aphids from everything else. Also marigolds, petunias and geraniums as pest controllers. Onions spread out throughout the garden for same. Wish I could find the battery charger for the camera, so I could get pix. Keep on keepin on, Winston! Life is defined by abundance, not scarcity. That’s subversive knowledge.
9 July 2011, 7:41 amSt. Jude as Claus:
I would like to takea a few moments to show how this front yard vegitable garden could relate to jury nullification.
10 July 2011, 6:09 amA referendun gets held in Maybeery and 60% of the vote, with a 55% turn out of registered voters, votes to prohibit front yard veggie gardens.
The town council quickly and with great fanfare passes a law prohibiting them. 6 of the 12 families in the town affected by the law then uproot
their gardens. 6 families do not and are taken to court by the government.
In this area a to get a conviction the government needs to not only prove that the people charged actually committed the crime but 9 or the 12 jurors have to agree that the law is just. 5 of the six charged families adopt a defensive strategy to convince at least 3 of the jurors that the law is unjust. 1 of the families takes a different position. The husband takes the position that he does not have the authority to destroy the garden because it is his wife’s garden. The wife says that the garden is her daughter’s. The daughter says that it is her father’s garden. All three deny having ever worked in the garden. The government responds by charging this family with conspiracy and perjury in addition to growing a garden in their front yard.
By the end of the year all six trials are completed with six victories for the government and two for the defendants.
Since the government can not retry someone for the same crime 2 families have recieved what amounts to a grandfather clause to plant front yard gardens. The other 4 families now must either obey the law or move. 2 families decide to move and learn that property values in the town are rising because pro and anti vegitable garden factions from across the country are trying to stack the towns population deck, and therefore the jury pool, in their favor. Although most new residents are opposed to front yard vegitable gardens it is not the actual numbers that unt so much as the movement of the numbers in one direction or the other.
In a second round of trials the number of families that gain an exemption to the law increases by one or two more. The defence of the right to grow veggies in your front yard does not comr cheap however. The prosecuters have the resources of the town to back them up.
The defendants have only their own resources and some support from some relatively insignificant liberal and libertarian activist groups.
The costs of the trials creates a much greater strain the defendants than it does on the town government.
So who will more tenaciuosly cling to their vision of the future? Will it be the gardners that have to pay a very high cost for disobidence or the state that little by little is seeing its moral authority on this issue being eroded.
DVDs of future issues of Maybeery RFD are available at you local library. Just use the password “Quantum Web”.
St. Jude as Claus:
Just another short condsideration. The resources of the prosecuting attorney, working for the town, county, state, or nstion is also not unlimited. Wtih the Budget that they have they have to prosecute what may be a long or a short list of people who have broken the law.
11 July 2011, 7:22 amWe have this concept that work expands to fill the time available. Of course in an area with many violent crimes the prosecutors office will not likely be concerned with someone planting veggies in the front yard. Would it work out that in a low crime area there would be more laws paased to regulate the non violent behavior of the residences because there is an excess of power to coerce people in to behaving in a particular way?
After a few show trials prosecuting people for feeding the homeless in a park or for growing a front yard veggie garden the intrests of the prosecutors office might very well wander off to a new cause of the month leaving future non compliers free to go about thier work undisturbed.
You may not think that this is a very valuable consideration. Non the less I am preparing a 180 pound bill for this work. Accept the bill or I will add a sir charge.
St. Jude as Claus:
The worst charachteristic that a government or a leader can be charged with is capricousness. This rule against front yard veggie gardens does not seem capricous to me. It does seem to me to be to trivial to spend government resources enforcing. I can understand why some people would like thr rule. A front yard veggie garden would seem to indicate that the homeowner is struggling financially. Some poeple would percieve that as driving down the values of nearby properties. If that were the case it would clearly be creating a negative externality. The Orlando case of feeding homeless people in the part seems to be much more capricous. If there were any negative externalities from this activitly is would be much much easier to avoid. I find it surprising that aby other than the Grinch who stole Christmas could support such a rule.
12 July 2011, 9:54 amZoning laws are a different matter though. One of the things that I like about zoning is that it can give a neighborhood a scent of commmuntiy. Perhaps it wouild only be a fake scent yet it would fool an outsider.
Perhaps creating even a fake scent of communtiy is the first step in creating a real sense of communtiy.
It takes a community to raise a child. Parents can not do it alone. So creating a scent of community creates a positive externality for the residents. An simple example would be if all of the houses in the communtiy painted their shutters with diagonal green yellow and black stripes. (Or red and white stripes if that fit the local srchitecture better.)
If there were a law in my neighborhhod against front yard veggie gardens I would obey it unless I had a good reason not to like the backyard gets no sunlight becasue of a nearby highrise, or the backyard is a dog’s living area. If there were a law that all front doors and the trim around all of the windows must be blue I would obey that law too. Neigborhoods that have some archectural commonality tying togehter the different structures are neighborhoods that I find quite nice.
St. Jude as Claus:
Yes I once had this dream that was walking through a town in England. This was a few months before I actually went to England. The town that I imagined was one that I think is more beautiful than any town that actually exsists in England. Althought only having seen a very small percentage of the country, in this life anyways, a more beautiful town may exist there.
12 July 2011, 5:14 pmThe town, or perhaps a neighborhood in a city, had a narrow street lined with houses that had field stone walls on the ground floor. Above that the second floors were all made of wood beams that were painted a blueish green or perhaps some would say greenish blue, imagine the color of a Spruce Tree. The second floor was bigger than the first floor on all of the buildings and the overhang was made even bigger by the balconeies that extended from the fronts of the second floor of the buildings.
There were no people in my dream.
Not really an exciting dream but it left me with a feeling of peace and pleasure. I would not complain if I had more dreams like that.
Here hoping that you have a happy Storming the Bastille Day.(July 14th) One of my favorite days of history.
Michael Anderson:
Got this in my email today:
GOD & LAWN CARE
God said : “Frank, you know all about gardens and nature. What in the world is going on down there on the planet? What happened to the dandelions, violets, milkweeds and stuff I started eons ago? I had a perfect no-maintenance garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long-lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honey bees and flocks of songbirds. I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But, all I see are these green rectangles.”
St. FRANCIS:
It’s the tribes that settled there, Lord. The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers ‘weeds’ and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.
GOD:
Grass? But, it’s so boring. It’s not colorful. It doesn’t attract butterflies, birds and bees; only grubs and sod worms. It’s sensitive to temperatures. Do these Suburbanites really want all that grass growing there?
ST. FRANCIS:
Apparently so, Lord. They go to great pains to grow it and keep it green. They begin each spring by fertilizing grass and poisoning any other plant that crops up in the lawn.
GOD:
The spring rains and warm weather probably make grass grow really fast. That must make the Suburbanites happy.
ST. FRANCIS:
Apparently not, Lord. As soon as it grows a little, they cut it-sometimes twice a week.
GOD:
They cut it? Do they then bale it like hay?
ST. FRANCIS:
Not exactly, Lord. Most of them rake it up and put it in bags.
GOD:
They bag it? Why? Is it a cash crop? Do they sell it?
ST. FRANCIS:
No, Sir, just the opposite. They pay to throw it away.
GOD:
Now, let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will grow. And, when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?
ST. FRANCIS:
Yes, Sir.
GOD:
These Suburbanites must be relieved in the summer when we cut back on the rain and turn up the heat. That surely slows the growth and saves them a lot of work.
ST. FRANCIS:
You aren’t going to believe this, Lord. When the grass stops growing so fast, they drag out hoses and pay more money to water it, so they can continue to mow it and pay to get rid of it.
GOD:
What nonsense. At least they kept some of the trees. That was a sheer stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. The trees grow leaves in the spring to provide beauty and shade in the summer. In the autumn, they fall to the ground and form a natural blanket to keep moisture in the soil and protect the trees and bushes. It’s a natural cycle of life.
ST. FRANCIS:
You better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle. As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.
GOD:
No!? What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter to keep the soil moist and loose?
ST. FRANCIS:
After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.
GOD:
And where do they get this mulch?
ST. FRANCIS:
They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.
GOD:
Enough! I don’t want to think about this anymore. St. Catherine, you’re in charge of the arts. What movie have you scheduled for us tonight?
ST. CATHERINE:
‘Dumb and Dumber’, Lord. It’s a story about …
GOD:
2 August 2011, 7:57 pmNever mind, I think I just heard the whole story from St. Francis