Tomatoland

Who doesn’t wait longingly for the first native tomato?

It’s the highlight of the summer for me……and you thought it was the sunshine and heat! ha-ha

But heat tomatoes do need so I won’t complain.

Last week when we were getting ready for the storm I was listening to the radio.

Science Friday was on. One of my favorite programs.

Do you listen to it?

The guest was Barry Estabrook who just wrote a book

called Tomatoland.

The interview is below

I could go into everything they talked about but I’d rather have you listen to the interview.

Unfortunately it is 21 minutes long so I found a shorter one for you from

All Things Considered

HERE

(I couldn’t embed it like the others so just hit the HERE part)

and

Fresh Air with Terry Gross’

interview

Now if I could just get my internet to come back on. Uggghhhh

Using Live Writer to get some of the post done…..don’t need to be online.

I will warn you that this is not a “pretty” story about tomato recipes or how

to grow a better tomato in your garden but where tomatoes come from

out of season.

I never buy tomatoes in the winter but I may get a slice on a sandwich if I get something

from a restaurant.

It may seem insignificant ( a couple of little slice) but it will give me pause and have me saying

No Tomato please …..(unless you know where it comes from…

and most likely they won’t.)

I added this text from the Science Friday interview that I didn’t want you to miss.

This is the part I found the most disturbing.

FLATOW: Wow, and you outline in your book something I have never heard since I watched "The Grapes of Wrath" on television recently, that there are  foreign workers who are brought in and they are made to be virtual slaves to pick these tomatoes.
ESTABROOK: I'm going to have to take a little bit of an issue with you. Virtual is not a qualifier I would use. Let me run down a couple of quick details: locked up, shackled in chains at night, locked in the back of produce trucks at night so that they're handy to be delivered to the fields in the morning, bought and sold and negotiated for almost at auction.
FLATOW: Tell the story of the Guatemalan worker as an example.
ESTABROOK: All right. He was a guy who came up here from Guatemala. His folks in Guatemala were both sick. The family had no money. So he took the usual route, came across the border, found his way to this town of Immokalee in southwestern Florida, it's sort of tomato capital during the wintertime.
And he was out of work and broke and sort of waiting for something to come along and was sitting on a bench with a few other guys, and this fellow pulls up in a pickup truck and he says: Anyone want work? The Guatemalan fellow said I do. And the guy said great, come on aboard. I pay twice the going rate per bucket of tomatoes. If you don't have a place to stay, we will happily put you up at our place.
My mom cooks for our crew. She charges you a bit of money, but she'll cook for you. You know, he thought: wow. He pretty soon realized that, you know,

he was put in the back of a produce truck. That was his room and board, and he got charged $50 a week. The food was atrocious, often just dry tortillas. That was $50 a week.

Everything came with an exorbitant imaginary price tag. To stand under a cold hose at the end of a day's work was $5, and lo and behold, he found that no matter how hard he worked, he kept falling further and further behind, and he saw what - if people didn't work, they were beaten. Some were hospitalized.
They were told that they were now property of this crew leader and his cohorts, and for two and a half years this particular guy worked as a slave. Occasionally they'd give him a $20 bill to, you know, keep his hopes up, but there was no regular pay, and he couldn't leave. And he had no choice of when he worked.
FLATOW: What do you mean he couldn't leave?
ESTABROOK: Well, as he pointed out, one of his crew finally just couldn't take it anymore and ran away, and one of the crew boss guys chased him in the pickup truck and came back an hour or so later, and the guy was beaten to the point where he was unrecognizable and had to be dropped off at the hospital, and it was - he was permanently injured. He survived but permanently injured. And the crew boss said: You want to try to run away from me? Take a look.
FLATOW: Is this still going on?
ESTABROOK: Sadly, it's still going on. This is not an isolated case. There have been more than 1,200 people freed from slavery rings in Florida agriculture in the last 10 or 15 years. Off the record an official told me recently that there's two cases currently under investigation. The problem is they're very, very hard cases to prosecute. So what you're seeing is the tip of a really ugly iceberg.

I want to say that there have been some successful cases that have come to trial

but this is not the end of slavery in America.

Sadly I have no answers to this problem but by bringing this to light maybe

changes will occur faster.

You can start by

shopping for your produce locally and at farm markets.

Buy only produce that is in season.

As you may have heard from the audio Whole Foods is

the only supermarket that has signed to the fair food agreement paying the workers

a penny more per pound making it twice what they get paid now.

( doesn’t seem like a big deal but the difference between making $40 –$50 a day to $70- $80 a day)

Linking up to Project Genesis.

Please visit Suzan for more on how we can improve our planet and it’s inhabitants.

YOU!

and thanks again for your love and support and emails from my last couple of posts.

I wanted to spend some time tonight responding and visiting

but we are going to a good friends wake…..

and I'm running late.....

so I will catch up as soon as possible.

Hugs,

Carole