Your Tomatoes Were Picked by Slaves

Remember this the next time you pick among the bland, tasteless tomatoes piled up at the grocery store: the fruit you are buying may well have been picked by a slave. In the United States.

This week, a delegation of food-industry observers and pundits is headed to Immokalee, Fla., the center of the region where nearly all of the fresh tomatoes we eat are grown. The reason for their visit: "to witness firsthand the miserable living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers."

Migrant farmworkers live and work under miserable conditions across the country, of course, but Immokalee is different in that it is "ground zero for modern slavery," according to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, who spoke to Gourmet magazine's Barry Estabrook.

Since 1997, Estabrook reports, police have freed about 1,000 workers—a tiny proportion of the total number of what have come to be called slaves—who had been locked up at night, often beaten, and had their wages taken away to pay for food, showers, and other life necessities.

And those wages aren't much to begin with. The going rate for tomato pickers (most of them Latino immigrants) is 45 cents for each 32-pound basket they fill. That can amount to maybe a couple of hundred dollars a week. But when your slavemaster forces you to pay $5 to wash yourself with cold water from a garden hose and charges you exhorbitant rates for meals, what's left of that $200 doesn't go very far.

Under pressure from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, big tomato buyers, after initial resistance, agreed to pay an extra penny per pound to increase farmworkers' wages in Florida. But the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange—the cooperative whose motto is "Growers Who Care"—has refused to pass the increase along.

Of course, the growers pass blame for workers' conditions along to the contractors they hire to recruit and "manage" pickers. "We abhor slavery and do everything we can to prevent it," Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the cooperative, told Estabrook.

Imagine: a business in the United States that has to defend its public image by insisting that it doesn't favor slavery.