Tomatoland (6 page)

If those roots
are going to do their job, however, they must be protected from competitive weeds, disease spores, and especially nematodes, which thrive in Florida. Growers have a ready solution to these
problems. They kill everything in the soil. To do so, they fumigate the beds with
methyl bromide, one of the most toxic chemicals in conventional agriculture’s arsenal. The
Pesticide Action Network of North America, a group advocating for stricter controls on pesticide use, rates methyl bromide as a “Bad Actor,” a category reserved only for the worst of the worst agricultural poisons. The fumigant can kill humans after brief exposure in small concentrations. Sublethal doses cause disruptions in estrogen production, sterility, birth defects, and other reproductive problems. Banned from most crops, methyl bromide can still be used on strawberries, eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes. The chemical is injected into the newly formed beds, which are immediately sealed beneath a tight wrapper of
polyethylene plastic mulch. Then the growers wait while the chemical does its lethal work. Within two weeks, every living organism—every insect, fungus, weed seed, and germ—in the beds is dead. “It’s like chemotherapy,” said Ozores-Hampton. Once the soil is suitably lifeless, it’s time to plant tomatoes.

To do this, yet another tractor traverses the fields. This one tows a contraption that could have come off the drawing board of Rube Goldberg himself. It has six low-slung seats behind its rear wheels. Farmworkers sit on the seats with their backsides only inches away from the top of the bed and their legs jutting forward—a position that from a distance looks like a child sitting on a small sled. Near one of each worker’s hands is a tray holding hundreds of six-inch-tall, five-week-old tomato seedlings. The machine creeps along the rows, punching holes through the plastic, into which the workers pop the little plants. All of the nutrients the tomatoes will need for the rest of their lives are sealed beneath the plastic, which can be either white to deflect sun in warm parts of the state or black to heat the soil in cooler regions. The plastic impedes weed growth, maintains even moisture levels in the sand, and prevents rain from washing away the fertilizer.

Even though all the plants’ basic needs are met,
tomato culture remains labor intensive right until the day when a worker manually picks the fruits from the vines. After being put in the ground, a tomato
plant will feel the touch of a human hand nearly a dozen more times. Within three or four weeks of planting, the growing seedlings need support. Machines drive wooden stakes into the center of the beds, and workers move down the rows tightly weaving plastic twine around the stakes and between the vines, a process that will be repeated on three or four more occasions during the growing season. Also at this time, the young plants are hand pruned. Using their fingers, workers pluck off suckers, shoots that spring out from the bottom of the plants and from between the main vine and branches. This forces the plant to channel its energies into producing fruit, rather than expending them on sprawling stems and excess foliage. Professional horticulturalists called scouts visit the fields at frequent intervals and carefully survey roughly one out of every twenty acres (forty- to forty-five thousand acres are planted with tomatoes in Florida) checking for insects and
diseases. They typically supply the farm manager with twice-weekly reports, and on that basis he decides what insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides to apply.

During the months it spends in the field, a Florida tomato plant can be attacked by at least twenty-seven
insect species and twenty-nine diseases. Between ten and fifteen weeds commonly try to out-compete the tomato plant for sunlight and soil nutrients. To combat these pests, a conventional Florida farmer has a fearsome array of
more than one hundred chemicals
at his disposal. The
Vegetable Production Handbook for Florida 2010–2011
, a 328-page “crop
management” manual put out by the University of Florida, lists nineteen available herbicides for tomato production, should nuisance weeds become an issue. These products have macho-sounding trade names such as
Aim,
Arrow,
Touchdown,
Cobra,
GoalTender,
Firestorm,
Scythe, and
Prowl.
Six of the recommended herbicides
fall into Pesticide Action Network’s rogues’ gallery of
Bad Actors. They include carcinogens, chemicals that cause damage to the brain and nervous system, chemicals that disrupt the reproductive system and cause birth defects, and chemicals that are so dangerous that even brief exposure
can kill a person outright. But that’s just the beginning. Tomatoes are notoriously vulnerable to fungal attack in Florida. Growers keep their plants’ leaves green and spotless with thirty-one different
fungicides, eleven of which are Bad Actors. And should any of the region’s numerous and voracious spider mites, potato beetles, armyworms, cabbage loopers, hornworms, tomato fruitworms, flea beetles, whiteflies, thrips, aphids, leafminers, stink bugs, grasshoppers, mealybugs, mole crickets, or blister beetles decide that a farmer’s tomatoes would make a good dinner, he can blast them with one of sixty pesticides, seventeen of which make the Bad Actor list. This
chemical defense system comes at a cost. According to figures compiled by the Florida Tomato Exchange, an industry group, a grower typically applies more than $2,000 worth of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to every acre of tomatoes (an area about the size of a football field) that he raises during a season. An acre of Florida tomatoes gets hit with five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as an acre of
California tomatoes.

A distressing number
of those chemicals are still on tomatoes when they reach supermarket produce sections. Using research compiled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the
Environmental Working Group found that 54 percent of tomato samples contained detectable levels of pesticides, which puts tomatoes in the middle of the forty-nine produce items they surveyed (celery, peaches, strawberries, and apples were the most often contaminated; onions, avocados, and frozen sweet corn the least). U.S. Department of Agriculture studies found traces of thirty-five pesticides on conventionally grown fresh tomatoes: endosulfan, azoxystrobin, chlorothalonil, methamidophos, permethrin trans, permethrin cis, fenpropathrin, trifloxystrobin, o-phenylphenol, pieronyl butoxide, acetamprid, pyrimethanil, boscalid, bifenthrin, dicofol p., thiamethoxam, chlorpyrifos, dicloran, flonicamid, pyriproxyfen, omethoate, pyraclostrobin, famoxadone, clothianidin, cypermethrin, clothianidin, cypermethrin, fenhexamid,
oxamyl, diazinon, buprofezin, cyazofamid, deltamethrin, acephate, and folpet. It is important to note that residues of these chemicals were below levels considered to be harmful to humans, but in high enough concentrations, three are known or probable carcinogens, six are neurotoxins, fourteen are endocrine disruptors, and three cause reproductive problems and birth defects.

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.