Tomatoland (19 page)

Technically, Brown has three jobs
, though he performs all of them from the same desk in a well-landscaped office park of winding, shaded lanes and low-rise brick buildings just outside Orlando. He is executive vice president of the
Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, and manager of the Florida Tomato Committee. Although the organizations are different legal entities, they share office space and some staff and have overlapping memberships. Observers of the tomato industry could be forgiven for viewing them as a single umbrella organization. Combined, the groups have the power to lobby politicians, advocate on behalf of tomato growers and handlers, advertise and promote Florida tomatoes, fund academic research, impose surcharges on
tomato sales, and determine the size and shape of every fresh slicing tomato shipped out of the state during the winter.

Brown is a slim, compact former Marine who still carries himself with a military bearing. He speaks with the soft southern drawl heard in rural North Florida, where his family still runs a farm. Brown is a passionate home gardener, and he gives the impression that he won’t be unhappy in a few years when he can leave the politics of tomatoes behind to retire to his plot of land outside Gainesville and tend the small grove of fruit trees he has already planted there in anticipation. When Brown graduated from the University of Florida in 1969, the Vietnam War was in full swing. He was offered a place in the university’s vegetable crop PhD program but turned it down and joined the Marines. “Being a typical southerner,” he said, “I bit the bullet and did what I needed to do for the country.” He left the service in 1973 and started as an extension worker for the Florida agriculture department. He has spent his entire career advising and representing the farming industry through government posts and as an employee of trade associations. As the personification of the Florida tomato industry, he has had occasion to draw on the toughness and discipline he learned in the military forty years ago.

My first glimpse of the power of the Florida Tomato Committee came in 2005, when
I encountered a grower named Joe Procacci
who was making national headlines by claiming that his company,
Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation, had finally cracked the tomato code. Procacci farmed thousands of acres in Florida, and by crossing thick-skinned, disease-resistant Florida field tomatoes with a French heirloom variety called the
Marmande, he had managed to breed a good-tasting tomato that was tough enough to be grown in the South in the winter, shipped north, and sold in supermarkets—or so he claimed. Though it might have been good tasting, it was not good looking. Procacci was the first to admit that his new tomatoes, like their heirloom parent, were often asymmetrical, lumpy, and deeply creased. They were so ugly that produce managers often rejected
orders, prompting Procacci to make a virtue out of necessity by giving them the unforgettable trade name
UglyRipe. They were an immediate hit in the marketplace.

Perhaps too much of a hit. For a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Tomato Committee allowed Procacci to sell his homely fruits as an experimental crop. But in 2004 when UglyRipes started to become serious rivals to the pretty, smooth-skinned, and utterly tasteless fruits that other farmers grew, the committee ordered him to stop selling them outside the state, even though he had seven hundred acres of ripening UglyRipes in the ground. Procacci had no choice but to feed some of his premium tomatoes to cattle and compost the rest. He lost $3 million. “The cows were eating better tomatoes that winter than the consumers,” he said.

Thanks to an arcane document called
Federal Marketing Order 966, the Florida Tomato Committee has the ultimate say over the qualities a slicing tomato must have if it is to be exported from the southern part of the state. The
Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937
, which paved the way for the creation of Order 966, was passed to allow certain types of farmers to band together and control commodities without being subject to antitrust prosecution. At the time, the act made good sense. In an era when fruits and vegetables were grown by hundreds of small farmers who sold their crops to packinghouses, it assured that growers met consistent standards and that their crops were sold in an orderly manner. Today, when just a dozen large companies are responsible for the vast majority of Florida’s production and pack the tomatoes they have grown on their own farms, the financial logic behind such enforced standardization no longer applies. But the power of the marketing orders has in no way diminished. The Florida Tomato Committee decrees the exact size, color, texture, and shape of exported slicing tomatoes. It prevents the shipping of tomatoes that are lopsided, kidney shaped, elongated, angular, ridged, rough, or otherwise “deformed.” It delineates down to the millimeter the permissible depth and length of the “growth” cracks surrounding
the scar where the fruit has been attached to the stem. It’s worth noting that nowhere do the regulations mention taste—it’s simply not a consideration. “Taste is subjective,” said
Steve Jonas, a compliance officer at the committee. UglyRipes failed to meet many of these cosmetic standards. It did not matter that consumers were happy with them and obligingly paid nearly four times what they paid for “Florida rounds,” as the gassed mature green tomatoes are called.

By taking on Procacci
, the committee had picked a formidable and cagey foe. In his late seventies at the time, he looked like anybody’s happily retired Italian grandfather, and in fact a caricature of his smiling face appears on displays of a brand of his tomatoes called
Papa Joe’s. For all his folksy demeanor, though, Procacci controlled one of the largest produce companies in the United States. Through various corporations, he had interests in
Gargiulo, Inc., a major producer of Florida rounds, and also Ag-Mart, the large company responsible for premium niche-market products like
Santa Sweets grape tomatoes and UglyRipes. Procacci had been in the business long enough to recognize a once-in-a-life-time marketing opportunity when he saw one, and he was eager to talk. When I met him in the parking lot of a Naples country club, which he and his brother had built on what was once a tomato field, he immediately plopped an inch-thick stack of photocopied press clippings on my lap. They all hewed closely to the same narrative line: A noble farmer grows a great-tasting crop and the Big Bad Tomato Committee won’t let him sell it. In reality, it was more like a family squabble among the Goliaths of Tomatoland.

“It’s very simple,” Procacci explained, as we drove out to see a plot of UglyRipes he had planted to serve the in-state market, which the committee does not regulate. “The committee members are my competitors, and they are jealous. There’s a lot of jealousy in this business. They can’t have it, so they don’t want us to have it, either.”

Whatever its motive, the Tomato Committee refused to budge. When negotiations reached a deadlock, Procacci took his case to the USDA, arguing that if the committee allowed producers to export
cherry, grape, and plum tomatoes—none of which met its standards for shape—why prevent
UglyRipes? The federal bureaucrats turned him down flatly. He brought in lawyers and hired the Washington, DC, lobbying firm that employed
John R. Block, who had been President Reagan’s agriculture secretary, to take the UglyRipe message to the highest levels in the country.

Procacci did not have to tell me when we arrived at his UglyRipe field. Against a windbreak of cypress trees, I saw several rows of staked vines being ministered to by a harvesting crew. Instead of grabbing the tomatoes off the vines with their bare hands as fast as they could, throwing them into buckets, and unceremoniously upending those into an open truck, these pickers wore gloves to prevent scratching the fruits with their fingernails. They eased the ugly tomatoes two deep into plastic flats. The bottoms of those fruits were blushing a light shade of pink. In a field of Florida rounds, any color other than green is considered seditious. Procacci told me that the first-class treatment of UglyRipes continued at the packing plant, where they were hand sorted (only four out of ten would be deemed worthy to wear an UglyRipe trademark sticker) and individually slipped into foam-mesh “socks” for their journey to grocery stores.

“We can pack fifty or sixty truckloads of mature green tomatoes a day with the same amount of help as we need to pack two truckloads of UglyRipes,” said Procacci. “We have to charge a premium price for UglyRipes, but people are willing to pay it. My competitors have all this money invested to
process the mature greens, and they want to protect that investment. But it is a diminishing market. More and more, people want flavor. Consumers are not going to eat fruits and vegetables if they don’t taste good, and they are going to eat more of them if they do taste good.”

The fight between Procacci and the Tomato Committee played out in the U.S. Senate. Senators
Arlen Specter and
Rick Santorum, Republicans representing Pennsylvania, where Procacci Brothers Sales is
based,
introduced legislation that would specifically exempt UglyRipes
from federal grading standards, provided that the agriculture department enrolled them in a special program that was designed to track
genetically modified foods—which UglyRipes are not. Despite a twenty-four page appeal written by Reggie
Brown on behalf of the Tomato Committee and a personal letter from then Florida Governor
Jeb Bush, UglyRipes got their
exemption in early 2007, days after Governor Bush left office.

Procacci had scored two victories in one. I have eaten my share of $4-a-pound UglyRipes. None have packed anything close to the flavor power of a locally grown summer tomato. Some have been quite pleasant tasting, some so-so, and others not good at all. But no matter. The melee in the press did more to polish UglyRipe’s image than the most elaborate advertising campaign ever could have. With his exemption in hand, Procacci was able to cash in on years of pent-up consumer demand. The Tomato Committee had done him an enormous favor.

Reggie Brown represents an industry that faces far greater problems than whether to allow one of its key players to sell homely tomatoes. Almost all American farmers have seen their share of the retail price of their product decline steadily as middlemen gobble up greater margins, but
Florida tomato growers have been falling further behind
than most.
In the last three decades
, the price we pay for fresh tomatoes in supermarkets has increased fourfold. During the same period, what farmers receive has only doubled. At the best of times, the business is a high stakes gamble. Growers spend millions of dollars to put in a crop and then have to hope that their plants are not hit by a hurricane or a freeze. Even after a bumper harvest, there is still no guarantee that a grower will be able to sell his crop profitably in a market that is often saturated with tomatoes. Unlike corn, soybeans, and wheat, which can be stored until
prices improve, tomatoes are perishable and have to be sold soon after they are picked. “But sometimes you can make money,” Brown said.

The summer of 2010, when I met with Brown, was not one of those times. That winter, growers in Florida had been hit by a freeze that destroyed 80 percent of the state’s crop. “For every hundred acres of tomatoes that you lost in the freeze, you could kiss $1 million goodbye—gone!” said Brown. Because they had no other choice, farmers replanted the fields, but the weather refused to cooperate. Florida had sixty days of below-normal temperatures in early 2010, and the new crop grew slowly. Tomatoes that typically ripen 90 days after being transplanted into the fields were struggling to produce a crop after 110 or 120 days.

When the tomatoes did finally ripen, they landed in
a market that was awash
with overproduction from Mexican fields and Canadian greenhouses as well as the surge of replanted Florida tomatoes. Prices to handlers dropped as low as $3.50 for a twenty-five-pound box, less than it cost to pick and pack them. It wasn’t even worth harvesting the fields. Tens of millions of dollars of tomatoes were left to rot.

“It was a double-whammy,” said Brown. “We got hit when we lost the crop. Growers who had invested millions of dollars got nothing in return. And once there were no longer any Florida tomatoes on the market, prices soared to over twenty dollars a box. Mexicans weren’t affected by the freeze and they made a killing. Managers of quick-serve restaurants balked at the high prices and cut back on the amount of tomato-based items on their menus. They just walked away. So when our tomatoes finally ripened and the volume on the market returned to normal, we lost our shirts.”

The freeze marked the second time in two years that the industry in Florida had to struggle through a disaster. In 2008 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration implicated Florida tomatoes in
a massive salmonella outbreak
. At the time, Florida had $40 million worth of tomatoes picked and ready for shipping. Consumers abruptly stopped buying, and fast food chains cancelled orders. It turned out to be a false alarm. Food safety inspectors determined that the outbreak originated in jalapeños from Mexico. After six weeks of investigation,
the Food and Drug Administration completely exonerated Florida tomatoes, but it was too late for producers who had lost an estimated $100 million in sales.

For some of their
financial difficulties, Florida farmers have only themselves to blame. The infrastructure of the biggest sector of the industry is based on a technology that dates back to a simpler time when supermarket produce sections offered one type of slicing tomato, usually sold three-in-a-row in cellophane-wrapped cartons. During the winter, they were most likely grown in Florida. Today’s consumers demand variety. In the winter, my small town’s Shaw’s grocery store, which is a produce desert compared to larger, more urbane supermarkets, features a four-tiered display offering ten different varieties of fresh tomatoes. In addition to Florida rounds, I can buy cherry, grape, plum, on-the-vine-cluster, hydroponic, and organic tomatoes. Those tomatoes journey from greenhouses in Vermont and Canada and fields in Florida and Mexico—but mostly Mexico.