You Say Tomato, And I Say Slavery.

As knowledgeable shoppers, we all are aware by now that the tomatoes we buy at the grocery store, especially in the winter, don't taste very much better than a comparable sphere of styrofoam. That's why many of us don't buy tomatoes in the winter, grow our own in the summer, or find stores that carry heirloom tomatoes.

Reading this article by Barry Estabrook, however, will convince you that the truth about tomatoes is worse than you think.

According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.

Okay, not good news, but the tomatoes grown in Florida also have a lot of environmental issues.

Tomatoes' wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on earth. 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. To get a successful crop, they pump the sand 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.

And those toxic chemicals get dumped on the ultra low-wage workers in the field and find their way into the water supply and food chain. But that's not the worst of what happens to the workers. It appears that slavery has been quietly reestablished in Florida. Not figuratively, but literally.

In the last 15 years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 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 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. 

I recommend that you read the whole article, because this is something that it's easy to do something about. In the western U.S. most of our winter tomatoes come from Mexico. I doubt that working conditions in those fields are a whole lot better, but at least tomatoes are adapted to grow there. I pledge to check the origins of the tomatoes I buy and refrain from buying any from Florida.

I hope you'll join me.

P.