Consequences or What We Pay

I just finished reading Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook.  As you might expect, today's post is a little about this book.


According to the book, Americans bought more than $5 billion worth of commercially grown fresh tomatoes and most of these purchased in the off season months come from Florida.  It is the second most popular vegetable--second to lettuce.  But fresh tomatoes come in near the bottom of any consumer satisfaction survey.  Then why do we buy them?  Tomatoes from the grocery store are disappointing.  Tomatoes in restaurant food are even worse.  Pink, hard, tasteless... Even in season, the majority of food industry tomatoes are the pink, hard, tasteless kind...

This wouldn't be so bad if we were just wasting our money on disappointing food.

But listen to this...
"...a grower typically applyes 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." (p. 27)  By the way, California tomatoes are mostly destined for sauce.

Estabrook goes on, "A distressing number of those chemicals are still on tomatoes when they reach supermarket produce sections."  Although the amounts on produce are small and below the levels considered dangerous by regulators, think about the effect of the pesticides on the laborers who work in the tomato fields.  According to this book, "After being put in the ground a tomato plant will feel the touch of a human hand nearly a dozen more times.

This juxtaposition of a very fertilizer and pesticide dependent crop and lots of human labor is the crux of one of the stories of his book.  The stories of pesticide exposure and illegal and unethical practices surrounding pesticide exposure are horrifying to me.  There are regulations and laws about pesticide use and one of the reasons I'm not a fanatic about NO PESTICIDES EVER is that I believe that well regulated use should be ok.  But it doesn't seem so in Florida...

I won't go on, although the part of the book about enslaved tomato field workers was horrible.  I have to get ready for work.  Read the book if you want to know more!  But I have a question for myself (and you might have it for yourself, too, after thinking about this).  Why eat something that doesn't taste good?  Why pay money for something that doesn't taste good?  And especially why pay for and eat something that doesn't taste good when it's production causes so much harm, not just to the environment, but to people's lives?  I thought twice about out-of-season grocery store tomatoes before, but now I am even more aware of the consequences of wanting an out-of-season fruit or vegetable.  There is a cost.