Florida is warm in the winter, and it’s an easy trailer-truck ride to most of the country. But Florida is also about the worst possible place to grow tomatoes. Both the climate and the soil are completely unsuitable, Estabrook says, so farmers must drench their fields in pesticides and fertilizers to have any hope of a crop.
On top of that, the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — ‘I don’t get paid a cent for flavor,’
Estabrook says.
There’s an even darker side to the modern commercial tomato, too, he says. Up until recently, workers on many of Florida’s vast industrial tomato farms were basically slaves. People being bought and sold like animals,
Estabrook says. People being shackled in chains. People being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough, or being too weak or sick to work. People actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850’s slavery to me, and that, in fact, is going on, or has gone on
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
RSS – Posts