I finally admitted defeat and pulled the sickly plants from my little garden last week. As my own failure testifies, growing tomatoes in Florida is not an easy game. Nevertheless, the state is somehow the home to fresh, field-grown tomatoes. In particular an area called Immokalee, just an hour outside of Naples, is known for its tomato production.
It is also known as “ground zero for modern day slavery in America.”
I spoke with Barry Estabrook about the seedy underside of the Florida round tomato. Estabrook was a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine, has written for a myriad of great publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Men’s Health. He writes at Politics of the Plate.com, and earlier this month he released Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit.
Discover how the tomatoes in your grocery store's produce section were actually picked green, but gassed with ethylene to artificially turn them that appealing red, and how by simply buying tomatoes you might be supporting modern-day slavery.
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2011.