Tomatoland (21 page)

Brown replied, “Senator, that is one group of legal opinions. Our legal opinion is different, okay?”

“You might want to reconsider the attorneys that you are currently consulting,” said Senator Sanders.

“I was fried,” Brown told me.

That seemed like an accurate summation of Brown’s bad day in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. But, although Tomato Exchange removed the threat of $100,000 fines to members who cooperated with the coalition, members of the group otherwise remained defiant. Two and a half more years would go by before the Tomato Exchange capitulated.

In early 2009, after the sentencing of the Navarrete family members for slavery, then Florida governor Charlie
Crist agreed to meet
with coalition members. It represented a landmark. The workers had been asking Florida governors to sit down with them and discuss their plight for fifteen years—through four administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and Crist was the first to do so, perhaps inspired by the effect that national media reports on working conditions in his state might have on his impending (and ultimately
unsuccessful) run for the U.S. Senate. After the meeting, Crist wrote in a letter
to Benitez and Reyes:

I have no tolerance of slavery in any form, and I am committed to elimination of this injustice anywhere in Florida. I unconditionally support the humane and civilized treatment of all employees, including those who work in Florida’s agricultural industry. Any type of abuse in the workplace is unacceptable.

I support the Coalition’s
Campaign for Fair Food, whereby corporate purchasers of tomatoes have agreed to contribute monies for the benefit of the tomato fieldworkers. I commend these purchasers for their participation, and I encourage the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange and its members to participate in the campaign so that these monies can reach and provide assistance to the workers.

Florida’s agricultural industry has always had close relations with the state’s politicians. Crist’s letter must have stung, but it didn’t alter the exchange’s position.

Although major grocery chains (with the notable exception of Whole Foods) still held out, the Campaign for Fair Food had so far been a phenomenal success. Together, the fast food and food-service companies that had signed agreements bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Florida tomatoes each year. Their market share represented a huge financial incentive to any large tomato grower. If bad publicity was the coalition’s stick to prod recalcitrant producers, the buying power wielded by its roster of corporate partners was its carrot, and the carrot was growing bigger and juicier with each passing season. It seemed like only a matter of time before a large farmer broke ranks with his peers to get his share (or more) of that business. In the fall of 2009, that break occurred.
East Coast Growers and Packers quit the exchange and signed on with the coalition. In a lesson that was not lost on other Florida producers, Chipotle Mexican
Grill, the burrito chain with more than nine hundred restaurants across the country, immediately announced that henceforth it would be getting its tomatoes from East Coast Growers and Packers.

If supporters of the coalition thought that East Coast’s defection would have an immediate domino effect, they were wrong. When I met with Brown, the growers were still hanging tough. I asked if the exchange was in talks with the coalition, and he said, “We don’t have any contact with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. We don’t have anything to do with them.” He said that he really didn’t know what the coalition was. Was it an unofficial union? Was it a community organization? Was it a grassroots movement?

Five months later
almost to the day, an unexpected telephone call came into the coalition’s office.
Reggie Brown was on the line. The exchange was ready to join the Campaign for Fair Food.

In the intervening months, two other major tomato operations agreed to the coalition’s terms. Heading into the 2010–2011 season, after having been battered the previous year by the catastrophic freeze and subsequent collapse in tomato prices, and still stinging from the negative attention brought on them when it was revealed that the Navarretes’ enslaved crew had worked on their farms, Pacific Tomato Growers and Six L’s came aboard. With three of their largest competitors now part of the campaign, it was no longer feasible for the exchange’s other members to hold out.

A little after one o’clock in the afternoon on November 16, 2010, Brown sat down beside coalition members Reyes and Benitez at a folding table set up in the backyard of the coalition’s headquarters for a press conference.

“Our industry is and always has been strongly committed to supporting real, long-term and comprehensive solutions that improve the lives of all farm workers and their families,” he read from a statement issued by participating farms. “That’s why we have agreed to work with the CIW in establishing new standards of verifiable social
accountability for the tomato industry as a whole. We realize that this is a work in progress and that this partnership will get stronger over time. It will not be completed overnight. As time goes by, we are confident that we will be able to weed out the bad actors and, working together, build a stronger, more sustainable industry that will be better equipped than ever to thrive in an increasingly competitive market place.”

No other fruit or vegetable growers’ group in the United States had ever inked such a far-reaching deal with representatives of its workers. With the stroke of a pen, Florida’s tomato producers had put themselves on the road to becoming the most progressive employers in the country’s produce industry. Under the terms of the new arrangement, the 2010–2011 crop year would involve only Pacific and Six L’s. These two companies would work with the coalition to iron out practical issues such as the ones Brown had raised in the Senate hearing and build a template for full implementation of the
Fair Food Code of Conduct, which would be rolled out to all participating growers the following year.

With a major victory behind it, the coalition refocused its efforts on the
supermarket chains. By securing the exchange’s cooperation, a conduit had been opened for those extra pennies per pound. The onus had shifted to the grocery stores to join the fast food industry and others and pay a little more for their tomatoes. “Make no mistake,” Benitez cautioned at the press conference. “There is still much to be done. This is the beginning, not the end, of a very long journey.”

Sitting together at that table in the coalition’s backyard, Reggie Brown and
Lucas Benitez could certainly agree on that.

MATTERS OF TASTE

I
n early 2010, I enjoyed a supermarket experience that I’d never had before. I bought a pretty, stridently red winter tomato that actually tasted like something. It was by no means a great tomato, harboring only hints of the flavor wattage of a vine-ripened August tomato, but it was nonetheless unmistakably a tomato, in taste as well as appearance. As is de rigueur with so-called premium produce nowadays, my purchase, which weighed three-quarters of a pound and cost $3.47, versus 80 cents a pound for its nearby commodity cousins, bore a little sticker with the trademarked name
Tasti-Lee. A few days later, I returned to the same store hoping to replenish my tomato larder, but the Tasti-Lees had all been sold. And I was left to ask, what made this tomato so different? How come I had never heard of it? Why don’t all supermarket tomatoes taste like it did? And where could I get more?

With those questions on my mind, I drove to the
University of Florida’s Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, a curvilinear structure faced with pinkish bricks that rises like a space station from the endless fields of strawberries and tomatoes a half hour’s drive southeast of Tampa. There, in an office crammed with all manner of
tomato kitsch—coffee mugs, antique labels for packing boxes, framed vintage magazine advertisements for Campbell’s Tomato Soup, tomato piggy banks, tomato salt and pepper shakers, and teetering stacks of—who knew—
The Tomato
magazine—
I met John Warner Scott
, a professor of horticultural sciences. Scott, who is known far and wide in the tomato business as “Jay,” is one of the most prolific breeders of new tomatoes in the state. Over his three-decade career at the university, he has developed more than thirty varieties, although he doesn’t keep track. “I haven’t gone back and counted in a while,” he told me. Unlike seedsmen who rely on
molecular biology,
DNA sequencing, and in the case of some crops, genetic modification, Scott is the last of a dying line of old-fashioned plant breeders. His tools are the same ones the great nineteenth-century tomato grower Alexander Livingston used to develop the Paragon: a keen eye, a disciplined palate, and superhuman reserves of patience. Each year, Scott grows several hundred different varieties of tomatoes, called “parent lines,” in test plots surrounding the Gulf Coast center. His goal is to find plants with complementary traits—one may have disease resistance but low yields, another high yields but weak immunity—and crossbreed them hoping that some of the offspring will carry the best traits of both parents. Toiling in the hot sun, Scott pulled a floppy sun hat over his close-cropped graying hair and plodded through the rows, notebook in hand, carefully examining each plant and ticking off a mental checklist: How many fruits has it set? Are they big? Do they have cracks? Are their bottoms smooth and rounded, or do they still have scar tissue where the blossoms fell off? What’s the color like? “With some of them, you can just look at the plant and just throw it out,” he said.

If a plant passed visual muster, Scott took out his pocket knife and, still standing in the field, lopped off a slice and tasted it. “Plant breeding is a matter of seeing what’s good,” he said. “But you can’t make any decisions based on one season. You have to grow a variety a lot of times in a lot of environments to see if it’s really good.”

Tasti-Lee is not perfect. Its fruits are smaller than commercial growers like. But it is as close as Scott has ever come to finding Tomatoland’s Holy Grail—a fruit thick-skinned enough to shrug off the insults of modern agribusiness, but still tender at heart and tasting like a tomato should.

It’s been an enduring challenge for
tomato breeders. Modern tomatoes consistently rank at or close to the bottom of consumer satisfaction surveys. In the vivid words of one writer:

As for the reasonably fresh tomatoes
that one used to be able to buy at fruit-and-vegetable stores in the city, they seem to have all but disappeared, even during the local tomato-growing season. In their place is something that is called a tomato, that has the shape of a tomato and a tinge of the color of a tomato, and that sells at fancy-tomato prices, but serious doubts have been raised about whether it tastes like a tomato. Such objects can be had readily at any supermarket in the depths of winter or in the heat of summer. They lie in pale pink piles or in narrow plastic cartons, three or four to a box. Some hard words have been uttered and written about what has happened to the American tomato in recent years. “Insipid,” “blah,” “tough,” “like eating cardboard,” and “plastic junk” are terms that people apply to store-bought tomatoes today. Craig Claiborne, of the
Times
, has called the tomatoes commonly on sale “tasteless, hideous, and repulsive.”

Those words were written by
New Yorker
writer
Thomas Whiteside in 1977. Nearly thirty-five years later, Scott and a handful of other breeders are saying that it is high time someone fixed the taste problem.

Developing a better tomato can take years, and even then, there is no guarantee that it will be picked up by professional growers and have a shot at commercial acceptance. Florida’s multimillion-dollar tomato industry is littered with once promising but now forgotten
varieties. But in early 2010, after more than a decade of painstaking growing, breeding, and crossbreeding, Tasti-Lee left the rarified confines of academic test plots and rigorously monitored consumer-tasting panels to try to make its way in the competitive hurly-burly of the produce section. If Tasti-Lee lives up to its early promise, Scott will achieve a plant breeder’s version of immortality. The rest of us finally will be able to head to the local supermarket any day of the year and bring home a half-decent-tasting tomato.

But it won’t be an inexpensive tomato. Scott developed the Tasti-Lee to provide farmers in his state with a crop that can be planted outside to compete with hydroponic, greenhouse-grown tomatoes, the latest competitive threat to the Florida fresh tomato industry. Beginning from almost nothing in the early 1990s, greenhouse tomatoes expanded from a tiny niche-market novelty mostly imported from Europe to a mainstream produce item. They are now in every supermarket and account for about 10 percent of fresh tomato sales. Although Florida’s field-grown slicing tomatoes remain as popular as ever in the food-service industry, sales have declined sharply in supermarkets. With Tasti-Lee, Scott hopes to give growers a baseball-size tomato that packs the same flavor as the popular ping pong ball–size salad tomatoes produced in greenhouses and often sold in clusters on the vine. “It seems to me that it would be a win-win situation,” said Scott. “Consumers tend to be spoiled. They go into the grocery store and they expect to see fresh tomatoes any time of year, even if they grumble about the quality. I want people to buy Tasti-Lees because they like them, not just because they are the only tomatoes there.”