The taste panel was part of Klee’s attempt to identify which volatiles in what concentrations make a tomato taste good. The small heirloom called Cherry Roma—the epitome of the tomato’s dance between sweetness and tartness—has consistently won top marks. Larger varieties such as Bloody Butcher and Brandywine, much beloved by home gardeners, have also scored well. Once the test panels had identified about twenty varieties that consistently scored highly, he chopped those tomatoes up and placed his scientific salsa in a machine called a “gas chromatograph”—in essence, an artificial nose—to “sniff” out volatiles in the choice breeds.
In consultation with Howard Moskowitz, a renowned food scientist who has worked with major companies like Pepsi, Campbell’s Soup, and General Mills foods to develop new products (his discovery that some consumers like chunky spaghetti sauce made Prego a runaway success and gave birth to an entire class of bottled spaghetti sauces), the University of Florida researchers devised a computer model to provide scientific underpinning to the preferences of the hundreds of participants in taste panels. Klee unfolded a printout that looked like an electrocardiogram, with wavy lines running across the page. One axis of the graph listed chemicals, the other a single tomato variety. The lines represented the content of each chemical in the tomatoes. Klee jabbed his pen at a peak. “This beta-ionone,” he said. “We’re finding that tomatoes that rate highly overall always have high concentrations of beta-ionone.” Using his elaborate statistical tools, Moskowitz will be able to create a “formula” for a good tomato, telling Klee the concentrations of volatiles and other chemicals he should aim for. “What we end up with is a blueprint,” Klee said. “Then we have to figure out how to reproduce that blueprint.”
That involves searching for the specific genes that cause tomatoes to produce beta-ionone and each of the other desirable chemicals. That search is rooted in a greenhouse a few hundred yards from Klee’s lab, where he pampers some of the vilest-tasting tomatoes on the planet. They don’t even look like tomatoes: They’re green, and as hard, small, and unyielding as a pebble. But their beauty lies at the genetic level. By crossing wild-tomato relatives like these with domesticated varieties, botanists can see what genes produce what chemicals—a process Klee likens to discovering that a criminal you are looking for lives in California. “You’ve narrowed the search considerably, but you still have a long way to go.”
The criminal justice analogy is apt. To zero in on the gene he wants, Klee deploys the same DNA technology that police investigators use to identify suspects. He has now discovered about half of the volatiles he thinks must be present in a good tomato. Once all of them have been found, they’ll be a tool kit that breeders can use to reintroduce tasty traits into industrial-grade fruits. “There is no one perfect tomato,” said Klee. “It’s comparable to walking down the soft drink aisle in the supermarket. Some people are going to prefer Diet Coke, some Coke Zero, some Classic. We’ve found that Hispanic people prefer harder, more tart tomatoes than northeasterners. Probably because Hispanics are going to chop up a tomato and put it in salsa, while someone in the Northeast might slice it and put it in a sandwich. Different uses, different tomatoes. But there are some common traits. I think we can find them and re-create a pretty good tomato,” he said.
Pretty good for consumers looking for an out-of-season tomato worth its name. But how good can a consumer feel knowing that the tasty tomato has been raised and harvested by the most abused workforce in the country?
Fortunately, a scattering of groups and individuals are trying to address that problem. They may not have PhDs in biochemistry and horticultural science (although a few have Ivy League law degrees), but they are approaching the challenges of improving the lots of the people who bring us our food with the same persistence and tenacity as Scott and Klee bring to their breeding programs. They are far from their goals, but like Scott and Klee, they know where they want to go.
BUILDING A
BETTER TOMATO
THE FARMER
Road 74 bisects Charlotte County, running fifty miles due east from the Gulf Coast town of Punta Gorda toward Lake Okeechobee. It cuts a perfectly straight line through sparse, featureless fields dotted with herds of grazing cattle. Tom Beddard had provided me with the address of Lady Moon Farms, his mixed vegetable operation, but it had been twenty minutes since I last saw a street sign, house number, or for that matter, anything I would classify as a building.
My cell phone rang. It was Beddard. “Where are you now?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“You’ll see our packinghouse on the north side of the road. Can’t miss it,” he assured me.
A few miles farther along the highway, I pulled into a sandy parking lot in front of a beige warehouselike building. The place looked deserted—no other vehicles in the lot, no workers scurrying about, no sign reassuring a visitor that this lonely outpost was, indeed, Lady Moon Farms. I got out of my car. No one answered my knock on the front door. Around the side of the building, a lift truck stood idle beside some parked tractors and wagons. Assuming that I had stopped at the wrong place, I turned back to my car. Then I noticed a white pickup truck speeding toward the building on a lane between the rows. It stopped beside me. A middle-aged man with short salt-and-pepper hair looked me over from head to toe before unfolding himself from behind the wheel. He administered the sort of no-nonsense handshake you’d expect from a six-foot-five-inch, sun-weathered farmer. “Jump in, I’ll show you around the farm.”
I had come to Lady Moon to see the all but impossible, if the horticulturalists I had spoken with were to be believed. Since the late 1990s, Beddard had been growing tomatoes and other vegetable crops in South Florida using purely organic practices—no synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides—and succeeding on a commercial scale. Lady Moon Farms is the largest organic grower on the East Coast. Whole Foods Market is one of its major customers. In order to maintain a year-round supply of products, Beddard farms 850 acres in South Florida, 450 acres in Georgia, and 300 acres in Pennsylvania. “When I first came down here, everyone told me that you can’t do organic in Florida,” he said.
From where I sat in the cab, it was evident that he had proven them wrong. Square-edged rows covered tightly in white plastic stretched off to a distant cane windbreak. It was mid-October, still early in the growing season, and deep green tomato plants stood knee-high at three-foot intervals above the plastic. In the distance, a tractor crept along a row towing a sprayer behind it that filled the air with white mist. In another corner of the field, a group of Hispanic men were bent over the young plants. To me, Beddard’s fields looked exactly like those of Ag-Mart, Six L’s, Pacific Tomato Growers, or any other large conventional grower. But Beddard assured me that appearances were deceiving. That tractor was spraying Bacillus thuringiensis, a popular organic insecticide that is made from bacteria that are naturally present in the soil. The workers were wielding squeegees that had been soaked in common household vinegar to kill or slow the growth of weeds.
His biggest challenge in Florida, he said is getting nutrients into the sandy soil. “It has no fertility at all,” he said. “And growing full-size slicing tomatoes is particularly hard because they have to stay in the ground for such a long time that they can use up all the nutrients we’ve worked in before they ripen.” Beddard spreads spent compost from mushroom farms over his land before crops go in. When they are harvested, he plants his fields in cover crops of sorghum and cowpeas, which add nitrogen and also help ward off the nematodes that conventional growers kill with toxic fumigants like methyl bromide and methyl iodide. He pointed to a field that was ready to be prepared for planting. It looked like a stubbly hayfield that had been cut but not baled. “The cover crops were hip high before we mowed it,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of organic matter there.” Conventional farmers allow their fields to grow up in weeds during the off season, which they then kill with herbicides. Beddard simply disks his cover crops into the soil. A
nd where a conventional farmer would grow tomatoes in the same field year after year, Beddard practices crop rotation—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, salad greens. He says that his yields are lower than his chemically dependent colleagues, sometimes significantly, but he more than recoups the differences in yields through the higher prices he can command for organic produce. “I go down there to Immokalee and I envy those guys with their plants just hanging with tomatoes,” he said. “But I probably make more than they do per acre.”
Beddard, who is fifty-five years old, grew up a city boy in Pittsburgh. His parents were shocked when at age sixteen he announced that he wanted to become a farmer, but they allowed him to study horticulture at Delaware Valley College in southwestern Pennsylvania. In those days, the school not only did not teach organic farming techniques, it actively frowned on them. But even as an inexperienced student, Beddard thought that there was something viscerally wrong with using poisonous chemicals to grow food we would eventually put in our mouths. “I was viewed as a renegade with a hippie philosophy,” he said.
Upon graduation, Beddard discovered that there wasn’t any job he could get with his horticulture degree, aside from going into agribusiness or selling agricultural chemicals, so in 1988 he and his wife, Chris (who died in a car accident in 2004), bought twenty acres in Pennsylvania, five of which were tillable. Over the next ten years, Lady Moon grew steadily, selling first to local health food stores and eventually to larger supermarket accounts. The Beddards purchased more land as business increased and expanded from a two-person organization that dragooned the Beddards three children during peak periods to one that now employs 150 workers year-round. “I was fortunate that I hit the organic scene just as it was starting to take off,” said Beddard.
By the late 1990s, the Beddards had what seemed like an ideal agrarian situation. Although they worked long hours throughout the spring, summer, and fall, they were making a decent living and they had the entire winter off. When Beddard suggested that they buy some land in Florida to offset the risk from having all their crops on one farm, his wife wisecracked, “Yeah, and then we can work 365 days a year.”
Despite the dire predictions of experienced Florida growers, Beddard had a bountiful harvest his first season in the South. He felt smug until he read in Packer magazine, a trade publication for the vegetable industry, that growing conditions in Florida that winter were the best they had been in a century. Then a few years later, a single storm, Hurricane Jeanne, damaged his Florida fields, and then moved up the coast, hitting his farms in Georgia, before drowning out what remained in his Pennsylvania fields.
In 2008 his buyer from Whole Foods Market came to Beddard and said that the natural grocery chain intended to sign the Coalition of Immokalee Workers fair food agreement. They wanted to know if he would be willing to pay harvesters an extra penny per pound and comply with the coalition’s other terms. That request presented him with a problem. As a matter of policy, Beddard pays hourly wages—there is no antiquated per-pound piece work at Lady Moon. In addition, he provides free housing for his workers when they move north to Georgia and Pennsylvania for the summer. (They are responsible for their own accommodations in Florida, where they live for most of the year with their families.) He consulted his accountants and discovered that he was already in compliance by a comfortable margin with the demands of the Campaign for Fair Food. He laughed, shaking his head. “I mean, come on, we’re talking about a penny per pound. What’s a penny a pound to these big producers? What’s it to me? Nothing. It made no sense to me why they fought so hard and in doing so gave the coalition all the ammo they could have ever asked for. I told one of them, ‘Give them the damn penny per pound and they’ll be off your back.’”
We arrived back at his packinghouse, where Beddard carried on a conversation about laying some irrigation lines for a new field with his field foreman, a slight, mustachioed Latino whose features were hidden in the deep shade provided by the brim of his straw cowboy hat. As I turned to leave, he told me, “Organic farming in Florida can be a bitch,” he said. “But it can be done.”
THE LAWYER
In 1976 two classmates who had just graduated cum laude from liberal arts programs at Harvard College decided to have one last summer lark together before immersing themselves in the grind of three years at Harvard Law School. A professor of theirs needed someone to drive his car out West, where he had accepted a new position, and the two buddies volunteered. Today, one of those recent graduates, Gregory S. Schell, is a lawyer with the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project of Florida Legal Services, a nonprofit group that offers pro bono representation to agricultural laborers in disputes with the farms that employ them. His friend, John G. Roberts, is now Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. “But he was a Democrat back then,” Schell informed me. “It was before he drank the Kool-Aid.”
Schell chose a radically different path. It’s hard to know where he would be practicing today if a Harvard alumnus hadn’t come to campus to talk about the legal work he was doing on behalf of migrants in Immokalee. “It sounded a lot like the Peace Corps, except right here in the United States,” Schell said. “I thought, ‘This will be fun.’”
Arriving for what he pictured as a short stint, Schell was surprised to find himself in the company of some top-notch legal talent. “They had gotten into this work and found it very challenging and rewarding,” he said. “And you don’t have to wear a tie. That’s really important.” Over the ensuing years, in addition to notching up a string of courtroom victories, he learned to speak fluent Haitian Creole and married a farmworker, whom he met in Immokalee while he was suing the organization that employed her. Schell may be the only Harvard Law grad whose mother-in-law ran a tomato labor camp until her dying day at age ninety-six. And he rarely puts on a tie.
During his three-decade career as a legal advocate, Schell, with financial backing from the Florida Bar Foundation, has won a series of precedent-setting cases that have changed agricultural labor policies across the country. It was Schell’s lawsuit that established that growers are liable for violations of labor laws that occur on their farms, even if the immediate perpetrator was a second-party crew boss. The decision established that the farm operator is responsible for making sure that anyone working on his farm, including those employed by subcontractors, gets at least the minimum wage. Owners, not crew bosses, are liable if workers are transported in unsafe vehicles or housed in substandard structures. “We put an end to that contractor fiction,” Schell said. Unfortunately, in 2000, Congress enacted a law that all but exempts farm owners from violations of human trafficking laws perpetrated by labor contractors they hire.
Schell’s work also established that employers are legally responsible for paying for foreign guest workers’ travel expenses to and from their home countries. When farm owners threatened to have lawyers who represented workers arrested if they entered grower-owned labor camps, Schell sent in a sixty-four-year-old associate of his who was a grandmother, knowing they wouldn’t want to incur the negative publicity of having her being hauled away by police. Instead, the growers sued her for trespassing, and Schell, who is a fervent advocate of transparency, not only won the case, but prevailed in a counterclaim that required owners of labor camps to give unfettered access to legal representatives, members of the media, rights advocates, and pretty much anyone else with a legitimate reason to visit. In addition, Schell has won tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars in back pay for his impoverished clients.
Schell operates from offices on a side street in Lake Worth, a working-class city languishing in the glitzy shadows of its neighbors immediately to the north, West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. A man of slight stature, Schell peers out from behind a pair of owlish glasses. He could easily pass for an English lit professor. On the day I met him, he wore jeans and a faded short-sleeve madras shirt. Behind his desk, he was dwarfed by stacks and bundles of accordion files, manila envelopes, file folders, vertical files, FedEx shipping
boxes, loose-leaf binders, notepads, and books. To offer me a seat, he had to bring in a chair and wedge it into a corner, the only unoccupied space. And when I asked if I could place my digital recorder on his desk, he said, “Sure. Just make sure it doesn’t fall into a crevasse.”
Schell talks fast and in a high-pitched voice. His words roll forth in complete paragraphs, although when he warms to a subject, he sometimes neglects to inhale and has to stop and suck in a breath before picking up at the point at which he ran out of air, giving the impression that in the business of making sure that migrant workers get their due, there is far too much work and far too little time. If the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is the crusading political wing of the effort to end farmworker abuse in Florida’s tomato fields, Schell is its enforcer. “I’m not an organizer,” he told me. “What we do is get people money. I just make sure these guys get the minimum wage.”
His most immediate problem the morning we met was that he had to disperse the almost $1 million he had just won in a courthouse-steps settlement with Ag-Mart Produce. “Sometimes it seems like all we do is sue Ag-Mart,” he explained. “But they are far from alone and far from the worst actor out there.” Schell had filed eight class action lawsuits against the company on behalf of workers who had claimed that they were paid less than the minimum wage because they had received no compensation for “waiting time,” the industry term for the intervals between when buses arrive at the fields and workers actually begin to pick and between when they stop work and the buses finally leave. Those intervals can amount to several hours per week. In Schell’s practical world view, the biggest obstacle standing between tomato harvesters and a fair wage is not an extra penny per pound, but the lack of enforcement of labor laws that are already on the books. “Our experience has been that for the time they are actually picking, most people make minimum wage. What creates the problem is the waiting time at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. It adds up. If you could eliminate waiting time, I’d say that you’d have maybe 5 or 10 percent of tomato workers having problems with minimum wage.”
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Page 18