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Anyone who has known me for any length of time, also knows that I am not a tomato fan, mostly because I did not like the taste. I grew up avoiding spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce and even ketchup some times because they were made from tomatoes. Although I developed a fondness for the aforementioned, I still avoided tomatoes in their whole, uncompromised form as I still could not get beyond the texture and the taste.
Until fairly recently that is. Now you will never see me biting into one as one does an apple, but I will eat them in other forms – mostly in soups, pasta and other things like that. A few weeks ago, I cut up a tomato or two, along with some sweet peppers and onions, stir-fried them in a little olive oil and combined them with some black bean soup that I was making. Just this past week, I cut up the same, and made one of the best pastas that I have ever made (I also added sausage, spinach, peas and feta cheese). I find that by cooking with them, I am adding another dimension of not only health, but tastiness to my family’s diet.
With this in mind, I now try to buy tomatoes on a regular basis. So today, while I am at the grocery store, this is what I plan to buy and I usually pick up the roma tomatoes just because they are a little bit smaller. And they happened to be on sale for only $.99 a pound, which was even better. However, I usually look to see where they are coming from as this piece of information is really important to me. So, I asked the grocer who did not know but took the time to find out. Initially, he only found out that they were from the United States, but still this information was not sufficient enough. I said to myself that I should just buy them anyway and stop putting up a fuss. But he went to ask the produce manager and after five or so minutes or so, came back to inform me that the tomatoes were from Florida. This is what I was afraid of.
You see, Florida really does not have an environment conducive to growing tomatoes. As Barry Estabrook shares in his new book, Tomatoland, Florida’s sandy soil is devoid of any nutritional content. Because of these conditions, farmers and the like have to do a few sneaky things, such as pumping the soil with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and other pesticides, some which top the EPA’s most toxic list. Yet these are things that we end up putting up in our bodies, undoubtly with long term health effects. But the story from Estabrook’s perspective gets even worse:
Migrant workers are coated with these chemicals too. The toll that’s taken on them, in the form of birth defects, cancer and other ailments, is hideous to observe and should fill those who eat Florida tomatoes with shame.
I first learned of this issue several months ago while I was listening to Talk of the Nation. I was horrified to learn of the atrocities that these workers were forced to endure, mothers who had deformed babies born to them and others who ended up with cancer, all because of this evil, unregulated work.
I know that my refusal to buy tomatoes from Florida does not make a big dent in business. But hopefully, if enough people can stop buying tomatoes and even do a little protesting, we can get this thing changed.
So next time you go shopping for tomatoes, make sure to check the label!
