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06-28-2011, 07:35 AM
Nice Good article... TOMATOLAND Book Excerpt: Something is Rotten in Florida
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/26/3723673/something-is-rotten-in-florida.html
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) has found residues of 35 pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections.
According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) 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 as much Sodium.
Published: Sunday, Jun. 26, 2011 - 12:00 am
James Beard Award winner Barry Estabrook (http://topics.sacbee.com/Barry+Estabrook/) shows consumers the impact of growing fresh tomatoes in Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) in "Tomatoland: (http://topics.sacbee.com/Tomatoland/) How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit" (Andrews McMeel, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Andrews+McMeel/) $19.99, 240 pages). Estabrook allowed The Bee to publish excerpts from his introduction:
My obituary's headline would have read "Food Writer Killed by Flying Tomato. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Flying+Tomato/)"
On a visit to my parents' condominium in Naples, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Naples/) Florida, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) I was mindlessly driving along the flat, straight pavement of I-75, when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida's (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. But as I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was topheavy with what seemed to be green Granny Smith apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Chastened, I eased back into my lane and let the truck get several car lengths ahead. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. 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 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.
If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or a restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Although tomatoes are farmed commercially in about 20 states, Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Sunshine+State/) which ships more than 1 billion pounds to the United States, Canada, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Canada/) and other countries every year.
It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.
Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless commercially grown fresh tomatoes in 2009 – our second most popular "vegetable" behind lettuce.
We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn't mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket (or even the farmers market (http://topics.sacbee.com/farmers+market/)), but there's a reason you don't hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming (http://topics.sacbee.com/factory+farming/) more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/)
Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today's industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) 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 as much sodium.
This book began as an attempt to answer what I thought were a couple of simple questions. Why can't (or won't) modern agribusiness deliver a decent tasting tomato? And why can't it grow one with a similar nutritional profile to the tomatoes available to any housewife during the Kennedy administration? (http://topics.sacbee.com/Kennedy+administration/) My investigations into the mysteries of modern tomato production took me on a circuitous journey from my garden in New England (http://topics.sacbee.com/New+England/) to a research greenhouse at the University of California, (http://topics.sacbee.com/University+of+California/) Davis, to the rocky fields of a struggling produce farmer in Pennsylvania, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Pennsylvania/) and to the birthplace of tomatoes in the remote coastal deserts of northern Peru. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Peru/) But I always found myself coming back to where it all started for me – Florida. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/)
So, why can't we walk into a supermarket in December and buy the tomato of our dreams? Part of the reason is that it is essentially against the law. Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don't conform to what the all-powerful Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) Tomato Committee (http://topics.sacbee.com/Tomato+Committee/) says a tomato should look like.
The cartel-like committee exercises Orwellian control over tomato exports from the state, and it decrees that slicing tomatoes shipped from South Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/South+Florida/) in the winter must be flawlessly smooth, evenly round, and of a certain size. Taste is not a consideration.
If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest – within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck – is cold.
But Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) is notoriously humid. Tomatoes' wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru (http://topics.sacbee.com/Peru/) and southern Ecuador, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Ecuador/) some of the driest places on Earth. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Earth/) Taken to Spain, (http://topics.sacbee.com/spain/) Italy, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Italy/) and southern France (http://topics.sacbee.com/France/) in the 1500s, they thrived in the Mediterranean's (http://topics.sacbee.com/Mediterranean/) sunny, rainless summers.
They flourish in the dry heat of California, (http://topics.sacbee.com/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, (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/chemical+fertilizers/) and can blast the plants with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness' 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. (http://topics.sacbee.com/birth+defects/) Not all the chemicals stay behind in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) has found residues of 35 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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) tomato companies are struggling, always one disaster or disappointing year away from insolvency.
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 30 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, a harvester's wages have actually dropped by half over the same period. Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 10 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 $70 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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) tomato industry. In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney (http://topics.sacbee.com/United+States+attorney/) in Fort Myers, (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 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.
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.
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/26/3723673/something-is-rotten-in-florida.html
http://media.sacbee.com/smedia/2011/06/23/17/26/5i2xY.Hi.4.jpg
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) has found residues of 35 pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections.
According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) 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 as much Sodium.
Published: Sunday, Jun. 26, 2011 - 12:00 am
James Beard Award winner Barry Estabrook (http://topics.sacbee.com/Barry+Estabrook/) shows consumers the impact of growing fresh tomatoes in Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) in "Tomatoland: (http://topics.sacbee.com/Tomatoland/) How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit" (Andrews McMeel, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Andrews+McMeel/) $19.99, 240 pages). Estabrook allowed The Bee to publish excerpts from his introduction:
My obituary's headline would have read "Food Writer Killed by Flying Tomato. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Flying+Tomato/)"
On a visit to my parents' condominium in Naples, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Naples/) Florida, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) I was mindlessly driving along the flat, straight pavement of I-75, when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida's (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. But as I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was topheavy with what seemed to be green Granny Smith apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Chastened, I eased back into my lane and let the truck get several car lengths ahead. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. 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 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.
If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or a restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Although tomatoes are farmed commercially in about 20 states, Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Sunshine+State/) which ships more than 1 billion pounds to the United States, Canada, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Canada/) and other countries every year.
It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.
Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless commercially grown fresh tomatoes in 2009 – our second most popular "vegetable" behind lettuce.
We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn't mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket (or even the farmers market (http://topics.sacbee.com/farmers+market/)), but there's a reason you don't hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming (http://topics.sacbee.com/factory+farming/) more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/)
Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today's industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) 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 as much sodium.
This book began as an attempt to answer what I thought were a couple of simple questions. Why can't (or won't) modern agribusiness deliver a decent tasting tomato? And why can't it grow one with a similar nutritional profile to the tomatoes available to any housewife during the Kennedy administration? (http://topics.sacbee.com/Kennedy+administration/) My investigations into the mysteries of modern tomato production took me on a circuitous journey from my garden in New England (http://topics.sacbee.com/New+England/) to a research greenhouse at the University of California, (http://topics.sacbee.com/University+of+California/) Davis, to the rocky fields of a struggling produce farmer in Pennsylvania, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Pennsylvania/) and to the birthplace of tomatoes in the remote coastal deserts of northern Peru. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Peru/) But I always found myself coming back to where it all started for me – Florida. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/)
So, why can't we walk into a supermarket in December and buy the tomato of our dreams? Part of the reason is that it is essentially against the law. Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don't conform to what the all-powerful Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) Tomato Committee (http://topics.sacbee.com/Tomato+Committee/) says a tomato should look like.
The cartel-like committee exercises Orwellian control over tomato exports from the state, and it decrees that slicing tomatoes shipped from South Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/South+Florida/) in the winter must be flawlessly smooth, evenly round, and of a certain size. Taste is not a consideration.
If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest – within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck – is cold.
But Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) is notoriously humid. Tomatoes' wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru (http://topics.sacbee.com/Peru/) and southern Ecuador, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Ecuador/) some of the driest places on Earth. (http://topics.sacbee.com/Earth/) Taken to Spain, (http://topics.sacbee.com/spain/) Italy, (http://topics.sacbee.com/Italy/) and southern France (http://topics.sacbee.com/France/) in the 1500s, they thrived in the Mediterranean's (http://topics.sacbee.com/Mediterranean/) sunny, rainless summers.
They flourish in the dry heat of California, (http://topics.sacbee.com/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, (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/chemical+fertilizers/) and can blast the plants with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness' 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. (http://topics.sacbee.com/birth+defects/) Not all the chemicals stay behind in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://topics.sacbee.com/U.S.+Department+of+Agriculture/) has found residues of 35 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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) tomato companies are struggling, always one disaster or disappointing year away from insolvency.
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 30 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, a harvester's wages have actually dropped by half over the same period. Florida (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 10 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 $70 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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 (http://topics.sacbee.com/Florida/) tomato industry. In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney (http://topics.sacbee.com/United+States+attorney/) in Fort Myers, (http://topics.sacbee.com/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 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.
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.