Tomatoland (7 page)

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

T
ower 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.

“When you work on the plants, you smell the chemicals,” said Herrera, the mother of limbless Carlitos. Subsequent investigations showed that Herrera worked in fields that recently had been sprayed with mancozeb twenty-four to thirty-six days after conception, the stages where a child begins to develop neurologically and physically.
Meza recalled: “It has happened to me many times that when you are working and the chemical has dried and turned to dust that you breathe it.”
Although regulations require
that handlers of many of these pesticides use protective eyewear, chemical-resistant gloves, rubber aprons, and vapor respirators, the three pregnant women said they had not been warned of the possible dangers of being exposed to the chemicals. They wore no protective gear, unless you count their futile attempts to avoid inhalation by covering their mouths with bandanas. Herrera said she felt sick the entire time she worked in the field. She described being coated in
pesticides and suffering from dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and lightheadedness. Her eyes and nose felt as though they were burning. She developed rashes and open sores.

Giving up work was not an option. Herrera said that her boss, a subcontractor to Ag-Mart, told her if she did not work, she would be kicked out of the room that he was providing. Ironically, the impending arrival of her first child made it all the more important for her and her husband to have a place to live. She worked in the fields from preconception, through the early stages of gestation, right up until her seventh month of
pregnancy, only a few weeks before Carlitos’s slightly premature arrival. Even after quitting the fields, she continued to hand wash the chemical-soaked clothes of her husband and her brother, Epifanio.

Jesus’s jaw deformity proved not to be as dangerous as first thought, and doctors told his mother that the baby’s condition would likely improve as he grew older. Violetta’s parents had to mourn the death of their child. But after the birth of Carlitos, Herrera and Candelario’s problems intensified. The end of the winter picking season in Florida was approaching, and the family would have to migrate north to find work. But Carlitos needed constant medical attention, which he was receiving through a local agency, the
Children’s Medical Services of Lee County. Even though he was an American citizen by birth, his parents were Mexican and had no documentation. Deportation was a real possibility.

Things took a turn for the worse when at three months of age the baby developed respiratory problems that made it difficult for him to breathe. He had to be flown from a hospital near Immokalee to Miami Children’s Hospital. Lacking a car, Herrera and Candelario had to rely on rides from social workers to make the journey across the state, trips that took two and a half hours one way and could be undertaken only on days when Candelario was not required in the fields, where he still had to work to pay the rent. “There was nothing we could do for our little boy,” said Candelario.

One of the social workers helping Carlitos’s parents realized that the family faced an insurmountable financial burden and needed legal help. The social worker contacted a local lawyer, who confessed that he would have been completely over his head with such a complex case. He did, however, have a colleague who specialized in catastrophic personal injury, product liability, and medical malpractice litigation. He picked up the telephone and put in a call to
Andrew Yaffa, a partner in the firm
Grossman Roth, which has offices in Miami, Fort Lauderdale,
Boca Raton, Sarasota, and Key West. Although they had no way of knowing it, Abraham Candelario, Francisca Herrera, and Carlitos had just caught what might have been the first break they had ever received in their hardscrabble lives. If you are injured in a car accident, hurt on the job, or the victim of a negligent physician, you could do no better than getting Andrew Yaffa to represent you.

As soon as I met him
, I understood why Andrew Yaffa became such a successful lawyer. The day I visited, he was working out of the boardroom in his firm’s Boca Raton office. “I live out of a FedEx box,” he said. “I serve every office we have.” That afternoon he had taken over the conference room table. File folders were strewn here and there. His laptop was open. His expensive suit coat was folded over the back of a chair, and his tie was loose. Every few minutes when a cell phone on the table warbled, he glanced at its caller ID and replaced it without missing a conversational beat.