Flawed Fruit: The Not-So-Rosy Reality of Industrial Tomato Farming in America

Image Gallery Tomato fields are sprayed with more than 100 herbicides and pesticides. Fruits are picked green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding produces tomatoes with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A and vitamin C. The drive for low costs has fostered a thriving, modern-day slave trade. In “Tomatoland,” award-winning food journalist Barry Estabrook takes readers behind the scenes of tomato production in America — and you’ll never look at an impeccably smooth, evenly shaped and perfectly red supermarket tomato the same. COVER: ANDREWS MCMEEL PUBLISHING

The following is an excerpt from Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011). Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, perhaps none suffers more at the hands of factory farming than the tomato. Tomatoland traces the beloved fruit from its wild origins in Peru to its present-day incarnation in the $5 billion fresh tomato industry based in Florida. Fast-paced and suspenseful, this outstanding exposé of modern agribusiness shows the high price we pay as a society when we disregard sustainability in our food system. This excerpt is from the Introduction, “On the Tomato Trail.” 

My obituary’s headline would have read, “Food Writer Killed by Flying Tomato.”

On a visit to my parents’ condominium in Naples, Fla., I was mindlessly driving along the flat, straight pavement of I-75, when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida’s rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. But as I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was top-heavy with what seemed to be green Granny Smith apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield.

Chastened, I eased back into my lane and let the truck get several car lengths ahead. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.

If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Although tomatoes are farmed commercially in about 20 states, Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all of the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than 1 billion pounds to the United States, Canada and other countries every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial-scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless commercially grown fresh tomatoes in 2009 — our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn’t mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket (or even the farmers market), but there’s a reason you don’t hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.