With all the help they can get from their chemical friends, and provided that they are not killed by frosts or blown over by hurricanes, Florida tomatoes are ready for picking after ten to fifteen weeks. Ready for picking, but by no means ripe. An industrial Florida tomato is harvested when it is still hard and green and then taken to a packinghouse, where it is gassed with ethylene until it artificially acquires the appearance of ripeness. But as far back as the 1920s, food scientists had determined that no tomato artificially ripened with ethylene would ever have taste and texture equal to one allowed to ripen naturally. In the field, any fruits that show the slightest blush of pink, let alone red, are left to rot or are scavenged by freelance “pinhookers” who pay a small fee to enter fields that have been harvested and collect fruits showing color to sell to local restaurants and vegetable stands or through pinhookers’ markets. It’s not that the Florida growers can’t pack fully ripe tomatoes. They have done it in the past. But doing so requires frequent harvesting over a long period of time, which is costly. It is more profitable for them and their large fast food and supermarket customers to handle and sell tomatoes that are harvested in two or three passes when they are green, indestructibly hard, and impeccably smooth skinned and have a couple of weeks of shelf life ahead of them. Taste does not enter the equation. “No consumer tastes a tomato in the grocery store before buying it. I have not lost one sale due to taste,” one grower said. “People just want something red to put in their salad.”
Ozores-Hampton wasn’t picking tomatoes on the day I met with her, and besides, her experimental plots pale in size beside the massive operations of big packers. But Joseph Procacci agreed to take me to one of his fields that was being harvested. Procacci is the chairman of Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation, a huge conglomerate that raises tomatoes and other crops on vast tracks in New Jersey, North Carolina, California, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and in several parts of Florida. You’ve probably eaten a Procacci tomato. His company grows about 15 percent of the fresh tomatoes consumed in the United States. A spry, avuncular octogenarian with an acute mind and an almost extrasensory ability to read people, Procacci divides his time between the Philadelphia area, where the company is headquartered, and Naples, Florida, where he lives in The Vineyards, a self-contained minicity complete with golf courses, schools, and a hospital. The Vineyards was one of his tomato fields until the mid-1980s, when he and his brother decided that the ground would be more profitable if they put in a crop of McMansions and swimming pools.
Procacci, the son of Italian immigrants, has been in the produce business since 1935. Then eight years old, he came home from school in Camden, New Jersey, to see a loaded vegetable push cart in front of the family house. “Don’t come home until you’ve sold everything,” his father ordered. It’s a maxim that Procacci has applied every working day of his life over the last three-quarters of a century as he built up his multimillion-dollar produce conglomerate.
When Procacci and I went out to visit some of the six thousand acres of tomato fields that his company farms in South Florida, we traveled in his cream-colored Lincoln Continental. In the hush of the car’s air-conditioned interior, we motored east from The Vineyards toward the fields surrounding Immokalee, first on a broad boulevard, then on a more modest two-lane highway, and finally onto a grid of unmarked dirt roads that became thinner and more pothole riddled with each ninety-degree turn, until I was hopelessly lost and began to fear that Procacci was, too. The only indication that we were on the right track was that, all too frequently, an oncoming tractor trailer, top-heavy under a payload of bright green tomatoes, blasted past us in a cloud of sand and dust. The tomatoes looked simply unripe to me, but Procacci assured me that they were what the industry calls “mature greens,” ripe in all but coloration, which a day or two of exposure to ethylene gas back at the packinghouse would take care of.
Finally, at a gap in a sugarcane windbreak, Procacci veered into a field. I immediately discovered that Lincolns are called Town Cars instead of Field Cars for good reason. Procacci’s behemoth promptly became stuck in the dry, pale gray sand. I had begun to envision an hours-long trek in the hot sun to the nearest outpost of civilization, when a short Hispanic man materialized from between the stalks of cane. Before I could get out to help, he had leaned on the back bumper, bouncing the car and pushing. The tires spun, then grabbed, and we were once again surfing and swaying along a crude tractor path. We turned at another gap in the windbreak and encountered a crew of about three dozen pickers, all Latino, all dressed in long shirts and pants and wearing head protection against the sun—ball caps, straw cowboy hats, sweatshirt hoodies, or simply knotted kerchiefs.
Despite decades of efforts to design machines that can harvest fresh-market tomatoes, as they are called in the business, someone still has to pick each one individually by hand. Fresh-market growers are deeply envious of their brethren who grow tomatoes destined for canning (most of the canning tomatoes sold in the United States are grown in California), which can be harvested by machines. Fortunately for them, the canning varieties are determinant, meaning that their vines stop growing and most of their fruits ripen at the same time. Growers kill the plants with herbicide, then harvest the fruits with machines that winnow the fruits from the desiccated vines and leaves and deposit them into trucks. The occasional dent, gouge, or split doesn’t matter, because within hours the tomatoes are in giant vats being cooked in preparation for processing. Fresh tomato varieties, on the other hand, are often indeterminate. The vines keep growing and produce fruit over a long period. Tomatoes on the bottom of a plant will be plump and red, while ones at the top are still tiny, rock hard, and olive green. And there is no machine that can tell the difference.
Procacci and I got out for a closer look, our shoes sinking into the sand. For all their longevity and toughness, mature green tomatoes present a serious problem to growers. Short of cutting one open and examining its seeds and the gooey substance that surrounds them (called locular jelly), it is difficult to tell the difference between a mature green tomato and one that is simply green. When gassed, immature tomatoes obligingly turn the desired shade of red, but they will never develop any flavor—even by the insipid standards of Tomatoland. To get around this problem, field managers examine the crop and then tell pickers on a certain day to take all the tomatoes below, say, the third row of supporting twine and none from higher up. The less mature fruits higher on the vines will be picked by crews that pass through the field again a couple of weeks later. Typically, it takes three passes to bring in a crop. This arbitrary method increases the odds that most of the tomatoes picked are mature greens but provides no guarantee, which is one reason so many industrial tomatoes taste like nothing.
The primary job requirements for a tomato picker are to have fast hands, a back that can withstand being bent double in ninety-degree heat for up to twelve hours a day, and legs that can run over loose sand when carrying a thirty-two-pound bucket called a cubeta on one shoulder. Each picker in Procacci’s field had an assigned row. Each man—I saw no women—crouched in front of the plants and pawed furiously among the leaves, shoveling a steady stream of green balls into a plastic bucket clamped between his feet and lower calves. How fast he filled that bucket was all that mattered. Workers are reprimanded by field bosses for being too slow, but there is no penalty whatsoever for being too rough. Nor should there be. Nothing, it seems, can crack or bruise a mature green tomato. Upon filling his basket, the picker hoisted it onto one shoulder and ran, his shoes scuffing the sand for traction, to where a truck waited. Lucky workers had to take only a few steps to reach the truck. Less fortunate ones had to sprint for twenty-five yards or more. With a mighty heave, the picker tossed the bucket up to a supervisor on the truck, who unceremoniously dumped the contents into a “gondola,” a giant, open trough the size of a billiard table that contains fifteen tons of tomatoes when full. The picker is the last human to lay hands on a tomato until it reaches the supermarket or fast food outlet.
To see the next phase of a commercial tomato’s life, Procacci and I followed a loaded truck back toward Naples. Every so often, it hit a pothole or bump, and a few tomatoes would sail off, just as they had on that nearly fateful day when I drove along I-75. What passed for a shoulder on the narrow lane was littered with perfect, green spheres. We followed that roadside trail of green tomatoes for a half hour to the town of Bonita Springs, where Gargiulo, Inc., one of the companies that makes up Procacci’s produce empire, has a state-of-the-art packing plant.
Our tomato truck joined a line of similarly laden vehicles in the parking lot at one end of a large, warehouselike building. Even sitting still, tomatoes are subject to abuse. Researchers have found that internal temperatures in tomatoes waiting in the Florida sun to be offloaded can rise to 110 degrees. The optimum temperature for preserving quality is 68 degrees. When our truck’s turn came, a worker opened a panel on the side of a gondola. Another directed a high-pressure hose on the tomatoes. The spray, which came out with the force of a fire hose, swooshed out the tomatoes, blasting them into an S-shaped metal trough, where they bobbled through the curves like so many rubber duckies. Drawing closer to the trough, I detected an odor not unlike the one emanating from a public swimming pool. The tomatoes were being bathed in a warm chlorine solution, Procacci explained, to kill any bacteria that might have contaminated them.
Despite such sanitation efforts, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has implicated fresh tomatoes in at least twelve large multistate food-poisoning outbreaks since 1990, and in several other small local outbreaks. Tomatoes are responsible for 17 percent of all the produce-related foodborne illness incidents in the country, more than any other single vegetable. Between 1998 and 2006, produce grown in Florida sickened over fourteen hundred consumers. Salmonella is of particular concern. Birds, reptiles, and infected fieldworkers are all vectors for salmonella, which can stay alive in the fields and irrigation water for months. The bacteria can get inside the fruits, where it is safe from external attempts to wash it away, through roots, flowers, cuts in stems, and breaks in the fruits’ skin. Salmonella can also encase itself in a biofilm, a natural protective sheath it creates for itself on the exterior of tomatoes, rendering washing ineffective and allowing the bacteria to survive packing, storing, and shipping.
Once they had completed the circuit through the chlorination trough, Procacci’s tomatoes boarded an escalator, which took them out of the bath water and up toward an opening into the warehouse. Inside, the clatter of machinery was so loud that the verbal component of Procacci’s tour was reduced to gesticulations, mime, and the occasional shouted phrase. The incoming tomatoes rolled onto a conveyor belt with slats spaced about two inches apart. The smallest fruits fell through the cracks. They were destined for either cattle feed or compost piles. Those large enough to run this initial gauntlet traveled along a tangled snarl of conveyor belts moving so fast that individual fruits became a single blurred green stream. The stream flowed under a roaring machine that blow-dried the tomatoes and then another hissing device that misted them with mineral oil to prevent spoilage and give them an appetizing sheen. They emerged into a large room where rows of black and Hispanic women called “graders” stood shoulder-to-shoulder on either side of conveyor belts, their hands flying as they discarded fruits that were damaged, imperfectly round, or God forbid, showing any hint of ripeness. Once past the graders, the tomatoes rolled onto belts with round holes that sorted them according to size, small ones dropping through the first, smaller holes, the larger ones continuing until they reached holes with a large enough diameter to allow them to fall through. Another machine automatically placed flat cartons at the end of the lines. Once a box was mechanically filled with its twenty-five-pound quota, another machine slapped on a lid and sent the full cartons toward a final machine that stacked the boxes on wooden pallets, ten to a layer, eight layers high, a ton of tomatoes in all. Once a pallet was full, it was shrink-wrapped in clear cellophane and a lift truck whisked it off to a warehouse, where its contents would be gassed, or as the tomato industry prefers to call it, degreened.
Procacci ushered me into one of the tomato gas chambers, a room about the size of a small grade school gymnasium lined with rows of pallets stacked four high. The quiet was a relief after the eardrum-shattering noise of the packing area. Procacci explained that the tomatoes surrounding and towering over us were being exposed to low concentrations of ethylene, the same gas that tomato plants produce naturally when the time comes for fruit to ripen. I inhaled deeply. The slight sweetish odor was overpowered by the distinct smell of cardboard, but I couldn’t detect any hint of gas. Procacci said that the pallets would stay in the warehouse for a few days—longer if their eventual destination was near the warehouse, shorter if they had to face a days-long journey to a distribution center in the North and eventually to a supermarket or institutional dining facility near my home.
The system may work well for big tomato growers and their corporate customers, but two groups come out on the short end of the industrial tomato bargain. Consumers occasionally get a tomato that makes them ill. And they are almost always seduced into buying by the beautiful red exteriors and then—in the produce aisle’s version of bait-and-switch—they are rewarded with a mealy mouthful stripped of nutrients and devoid of flavor. “A total gastronomic loss,” wrote James Beard in his book Beard on Food, published in 1974 but still true today.
The biggest losers in Tomatoland’s hell-bent race to produce cheap commodity fruits are the men and women whose labor produces the food we eat. Day in and day out, they enter those poisoned fields and expose themselves to a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals. After my tour with Procacci, I met some of those workers I’d seen bent over in the fields. Their horror stories turned my stomach—a total gastronomic loss in the fullest sense.
CHEMICAL WARFARE
Tower Cabins is a labor camp consisting of about thirty drab wooden shacks and a few deteriorating trailers crammed together behind an unpainted wooden fence just south of Immokalee, a city in the heart of southwest Florida’s tomato-growing region. The community of poor migrant laborers is dreary at the best of times, but just before Christmas a few years ago, there were reasons for joy. Three women, all neighbors, were expecting children within seven weeks of each other.
But in the lives of tomato workers, there is a fine line between hope and tragedy. The first baby, the son of twenty-year-old Abraham Candelario and his nineteen-year-old wife, Francisca Herrera, arrived on December 17. They named the child Carlos. Carlitos, as they called him, was born with an extremely rare condition called tetra-amelia syndrome, which left him with neither arms nor legs. About six weeks later, a few cabins away, Jesus Navarrete was born to Sostenes Maceda. Jesus had Pierre Robin Sequence, a deformity of the lower jaw. As a result, his tongue was in constant danger of falling back into his throat, putting him at risk of choking to death. The baby had to be fed through a plastic tube. Two days after Jesus was born, Maria Meza gave birth to Jorge. He had one ear, no nose, a cleft palate, one kidney, no anus, and no visible sexual organs. A couple hours later, following a detailed examination, the doctors determined that Jorge was in fact a girl. Her parents renamed her Violeta. Her birth defects were so severe that she survived for only three days.
In addition to living within one hundred yards of each other, Herrera, Maceda, and Meza had one other thing in common. They all worked for the same company, Ag-Mart Produce, Inc., and in the same vast tomato field. Consumers know Ag-Mart mainly through its trademarked UglyRipe heirloom-style tomatoes and Santa Sweets grape tomatoes, sold in plastic clamshell containers adorned with three smiling, dancing tomato characters named Tom, Matt, and Otto. “Kids love to snack on this nutritious treat,” says the company’s advertising.
From the rows of tomatoes where the women were working during the time they became pregnant, the view was not so cheery. A sign at the entry warned that the field had been sprayed by no fewer than thirty-one different
chemicals during the growing season. Many of them were rated “highly toxic,” and at least three, the herbicide metribuzin, the fungicide mancozeb, and the insecticide avermectin, are known to be “developmental and reproductive toxins,” according to Pesticide Action Network. They are teratogenic, meaning they can cause birth defects. If they are used, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandates “restricted-entry intervals” (REIs in the jargon of chemical agriculture), the time that must elapse between when pesticides are applied and when workers can go into the fields. In all three cases, the women said they were ordered to pick the fruit in violation of REI regulations.
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Page 5