Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes

Barry Estabrook

Originally Published March 2009

If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery. 

 

*Photograph by Scott Robinson 

 

Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50 at 45 cents per 32-pound basket. But a lot can go wrong.

Driving from Naples, Florida, the nation’s second-wealthiest metropolitan area, to Immokalee takes less than an hour on a straight road. You pass houses that sell for an average of $1.4 million, shopping malls anchored by Tiffany’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, manicured golf courses. Eventually, gated communities with names like Monaco Beach Club and Imperial Golf Estates give way to modest ranches, and the highway shrivels from six lanes to two. Through the scruffy palmettos, you glimpse flat, sandy tomato fields shimmering in the broiling sun. Rounding a long curve, you enter Immokalee. The heart of town is a nine-block grid of dusty, potholed streets lined by boarded-up bars and bodegas, peeling shacks, and sagging, mildew-streaked house trailers. Mongrel dogs snooze in the shade, scrawny chickens peck in yards. Just off the main drag, vultures squabble over roadkill. Immokalee’s population is 70 percent Latino. Per capita income is only $8,500 a year. One third of the families in this city of nearly 25,000 live below the poverty line. Over one third of the children drop out before graduating from high school.

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.”
The beige stucco house at 209 South Seventh Street is remarkable only because it is in better repair than most Immokalee dwellings. For two and a half years, beginning in April 2005, Mariano Lucas Domingo, along with several other men, was held as a slave at that address. At first, the deal must have seemed reasonable. Lucas, a Guatemalan in his thirties, had slipped across the border to make money to send home for the care of an ailing parent. He expected to earn about $200 a week in the fields. Cesar Navarrete, then a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, agreed to provide room and board at his family’s home on South Seventh Street and extend credit to cover the periods when there were no tomatoes to pick.

Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans, rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should have paid that debt off. But when Lucas—slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet tall—inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20 some weeks, other weeks $50. Over the years, Navarrete and members of his extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000. Taking a day off was not an option. If Lucas became ill or was too exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18, 2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a hand hold and punched himself through. He was free.

What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried. “Unlike victims of other crimes, slaves don’t report themselves,” said Molloy, who was one of the prosecutors on the Navarrete case. “They hide from us in plain sight.”

And for what? Supermarket produce sections overflow with bins of perfect red-orange tomatoes even during the coldest months—never mind that they are all but tasteless. Large packers, which ship nearly $500 million worth of tomatoes annually to major restaurants and grocery retailers nationwide, own or lease the land upon which the workers toil. But the harvesting is often done by independent contractors called crew bosses, who bear responsibility for hiring and overseeing pickers. Said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, "We abhor slavery and do everything we can to prevent it. We want to make sure that we always foster a work environment free from hazard, intimidation, harassment, and violence." Growers, he said, cooperated with law-enforcement officers in the Navarette case.

But when asked if it is reasonable to assume that an American who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or food-service company during the winter has eaten fruit picked by the hand of a slave, Molloy said, “It is not an assumption. It is a fact.”

Gerardo Reyes, a former picker who is now an employee of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a 4,000-member organization that provides the only voice for the field hands, agrees. Far from being an anomaly, Reyes told me, slavery is a symptom of a vast system of labor abuses. Involuntary servitude represents just one rung on a grim ladder of exploitation. Reyes said that the victims of this system come to Florida for one reason—to send money to their families back home. “But when they get here, it’s all they can do to keep themselves alive with rent, transportation, food. Poverty and misery are the perfect recipe for slavery.”

Tomato harvesting involves rummaging through staked vines until you have filled a bushel basket to the brim with hard, green fruits. You hoist the basket over your shoulder, trot across the field, and heave it overhead to a worker in an open trailer the size of the bed of a gravel truck. For every 32-pound basket you pick, you receive a token typically worth about 45 cents—almost the same rate you would have gotten 30 years ago. Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50. But a lot can go wrong. If it rains, you can’t pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own medical care.

Leaning against the railing of an unpainted wooden stoop in front of a putty-colored trailer, a tired Juan Dominguez told an all-too-familiar story. He had left for the fields that morning at six o’clock and returned at three. But he worked for only two of those nine hours because the seedlings he was to plant had been delivered late. His total earnings: $13.76.

I asked him for a look inside his home. He shrugged and gestured for me to come in. In one ten-foot-square space there were five mattresses, three directly on the floor, two suspended above on sheets of flimsy plywood. The room was littered with T-shirts, jeans, running shoes, cheap suitcases. The kitchen consisted of a table, four plastic chairs, an apartment-size stove, a sink with a dripping faucet, and a rusty refrigerator whose door wouldn’t close. Bare lightbulbs hung from fixtures, and a couple of fans put up a noisy, futile effort against the stale heat and humidity. In a region where temperatures regularly climb into the nineties, there were no air conditioners. One tiny, dank bathroom served ten men. The rent was $2,000 a month—as much as you would pay for a clean little condo near Naples.

Most tomato workers, however, have no choice but to live like Dominguez. Lacking vehicles, they must reside within walking distance of the football-field-size parking lot in front of La Fiesta, a combination grocery store, taqueria, and check-cashing office. During the predawn hours, the lot hosts a daily hiring fair. I arrived a little before 5 a.m. The parking lot was filled with more than a dozen former school buses. Outside each bus stood a silent scrum of 40 or 50 would-be pickers. The driver, or crew boss, selected one worker at a time, choosing young, fit-looking men first. Once full, the bus pulled away.

Later that day, I encountered some of the men and women who had not been picked when I put in a shift at the Guadalupe Center of Immokalee’s soup kitchen. Tricia Yeggy, the director of the kitchen, explained that it runs on two simple rules: People can eat as much as they want, and no one is turned away hungry. This means serving between 250 and 300 people a day, 44 per sitting, beginning at eleven o’clock. Cheerful retirees volunteer as servers, and the “guests” are unabashedly appreciative. The day’s selection—turkey and rice soup with squash, corn, and a vigorous sprinkle of cumin—was both hearty and tasty. You could almost forget the irony: Workers who pick the food we eat can’t afford to feed themselves. The CIW has been working to ease the migrants’ plight since 1993, when a few field hands began meeting sporadically in a church hall. Lucas Benitez, one of the coalition’s main spokespeople, came to the group in its early years. Back then, the challenge was taking small steps, often for individual workers. To make the point, Benitez unfolded a crumpled shirt covered in dried blood. “This is Edgar’s shirt,” he said.

One day in 1996, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edgar briefly stopped working in the field for a drink of water. His crew boss bludgeoned him. Edgar fled and arrived at the coalition’s door, bleeding. In response to the CIW’s call for action, over 500 workers assembled and marched to the boss’s house. The next morning, no one would get on his bus. “That was the last report of a worker being beaten by his boss in the field,” said Benitez. The shirt is kept as a reminder that by banding together, progress is possible.
Even though the CIW has been responsible for bringing police attention to a half dozen slavery prosecutions, Benitez feels that slavery will persist until overall conditions for field workers improve. The group has made progress on that front by securing better pay. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the rate for a basket of tomatoes remained 40 cents—meaning that workers’ real wages dropped as inflation rose. Work stoppages, demonstrations, and a hunger strike helped raise it to 45 cents on average, but the packers complained that competition for customers prevented them from paying more. One grower refused to enter a dialogue with CIW hunger strikers because, in his words, “a tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.” The CIW decided to try an end run around the growers by going directly to the biggest customers and asking them to pay one cent more per pound directly to the workers. Small change to supermarket chains and fast-food corporations, but it would add about twenty dollars to the fifty a picker makes on a good day, the difference between barely scraping by and earning a livable wage.

The Campaign for Fair Food, as it is called, first took aim at Yum! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. After four years of pressure, Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and, importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes was being exploited. McDonald’s came aboard in 2007, and in 2008 Burger King, Whole Foods Market, and Subway followed, with more expected to join up this year. But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing legal concerns.

When the Navarrete case came to light, there were no howls of outrage from growers. Or from Florida government circles. When Cesar Navarrete, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 12 years in prison this past December, Terence McElroy of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services offered his perspective on the crime: “Any legitimate grower certainly does not engage in that activity. But you’re talking about maybe a case a year.”

Charlie Frost, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office detective who investigated and arrested Navarrete, disagrees. With one case wrapped up, he and prosecutor Molloy turned to several other active slavery cases. Sitting in his Naples office and pointing his index finger east, toward the fields of Immokalee, he said, “It’s happening out there right now.” Lucas, who received a temporary visa for his testimony, is now back in the fields, still chasing the dream of making a little money to send back home.

 Buying Slave-Free Fruits

 

In the warm months, the best solution is to follow that old mantra: buy seasonal, local, and small-scale. But what about in winter? So far, Whole Foods is the only grocery chain that has signed on to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Campaign for Fair Food, which means that it has promised not to deal with growers who tolerate serious worker abuses and, when buying tomatoes, to a pay a price that supports a living wage. When shopping elsewhere, you can take advantage of the fact that fruits and vegetables must be labeled with their country of origin. Most of the fresh tomatoes in supermarkets during winter months come from Florida, where labor conditions are dismal for field workers, or from Mexico, where they are worse, according to a CIW spokesman. One option during these months is to buy locally produced hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes, including cluster tomatoes still attached to the vine. Greenhouse tomatoes are also imported from Mexico, however, so check signage or consult the little stickers often seen on the fruits themselves to determine their source. You can also visit the CIW’s information-packed website (ciw-online.org) if you are interested in becoming part of the coalition’s efforts.

sources: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes?currentPage=3


 

Two Literary Heroes: Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe

 Two Literary Heroes:

Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe

I will share some useful information about two different heroes who were created by writers. I will give some separate information about them and then compare them. This can help us to reach some interesting conclusion about these two heroes. My main intentions will be about two imaginative men whose names were Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe. They both found themselves in a lonely island in different writers’ novels. They have become very popular figures in some societies and have caught the attentions of philosophers and political economists throughout the years.

Hayy bin Yaqzan:

The novel that was named Hayy bin Yaqzan and was written by Ebu Cafer Ibn Tufayl in the 1100’s. After 14th century this novel was translated to different European languages and made huge impression in these societies. It was translated to Latin in 1671 and to English in 1708.  Famous philosopher Spinoza and Leibniz were impressed by this hero: Hayy bin Yaqzan. The author, Ibni Tufayl inspired by Ibni Sina who was the most talented Turkish physicians and philosopher and wrote a similar story. The novel was translated to different languages with different names, such as The Journey of the Soul.

            Hayy bin Yaqzan was grew up in an isolated island. As a result of some attack to his family's town, his mother put him in a basket same as Moses and let him to taken by the sea. She was left behind crying and probably they all died after this dramatic event. Later a female antelope found him and raised him. He thought she was his mother. After the antelope gave a birth, Hayy realized that his new brother was not look like him. He became confused and depressed. He started to realize that he was different and he belonged to different types of creatures which did not exist nearby him. The first action that awareness made him to do was cover up his masculine part of his body, same as Adam. He pushed his abilities to seem and act more closely with the other members of the island. He tried to fly, but the result was fiasco.

When he was around 7, his mother the antelope became old and sick. Hayy started to learn how to use the materials that he could find from the forest and take care of the antelope with loyalty. When the mother antelope died he was faced with the reality of death. First, he thought that if he warmed the body enough his mother could be liven up again, but the result was negative. He then started to do a kind of autopsy to discover what was dismissing from her body that made her motionless. He checked all of the antelope's body parts and finally he opened her heart and found some emptiness in it. This was a kind of metaphor about the soul. The body was the same, but emotionless and some invisible thing left the body which was centered in the heart according to the creator of this story. He was not sure what to do with her, but thankfully he saw two crows that were fighting with each other. At the end, one crow kills the other and digs a hole and burry it in the ground. Hayy thought he must do the same thing for the antelope, too. This seems to refer to Adam’s two sons, Abel and Cain’s story.

After this tragic event, Hayy started to discover the entire island by himself. He could communicate with the nature by imitating their sounds and actions. This is a nice similarity with Prophet Solomon’s ability to communicate with birds which I learned from the Quran. In some part of Hayy’s adventure of life, he was lost in a huge and long cave in the darkness. If we accept the island equal to the world, the cave can be our lives especially our inner world where we have a lot of conflicts, labyrinths where we commonly lost. Even without thinking without a regular civilization and lack of language, he could still reach some high level of intellectual mind and find a God that Hayy spoke by using his inner voice. This was a kind of proof about the ability of reaching God in all circumstances even without prophets. (Hayy bin Yaqzan)

After a while, one man from a civilization, from a neighbor island came to the island, his name was Absal. After Hayy got enough ability to explain his life, he shared his knowledge and his awareness that he gained from his past experiences. In the book, Hayy was comparing his personal knowledge about God with urban man’s education based knowledge. Hayy and his friends surprised the similarities of their knowledge. Hayy’s beliefs and knowledge are purer than the others. This idea can be a useful trigger for the reader of the book to think about these topics deeper.

Absal invited Hayy bin Yaqzan to his ship and they went to his land. Hayy bin Yaqzan met with Absal’s best friend Salaman. They discussed what they thought about God and universe which was very different than customary beliefs. They realized that this awareness was not for all society. After some level of knowledge, they were not getting along well with others intellectually. They decided to go back to isolated island and live together. (Hayy bin Yaqzan)

Hayy bin Yaqzan became a foundation of many similar stories, especially, Robinson Crusoe became very popular. Since Europe has more advertisement power, then these kinds of stories and novels called Robinsonade type. Robinson Crusoe became more popular than Hayy due to the fact that the story came from Europe.

Robinson Crusoe:

            The second hero is Robinson Crusoe which was written by British Writer Daniel Defoe in 1729. The hero of the book lived on an island for 27 years. The novel includes the stories of Robinson’s life, but his special experience in the island. We can read his adventure as a simple story made especially for children, but with its all metaphoric specialties it symbolizes a white people who colonize the nature and nonwhite people. (Robinson Crusoe)

            Robinson Crusoe is very famous hero in the world. His story has been used in many humors. If we can think metaphorically about Robinson’s story’s environments, too, we can say the ship was the womb of his mother and he came to the island/world all wet and weak. He was helpless in the island, but he could use some materials from the ship’s debris to survive. It might be a little pushy, but this can feed our mother and giving birth metaphor, too. This is very similar to Adam’s first situation on the world, too. When Robinson reached to the coast of the island, he thought that he was punished by God. Then after he saw all the rest of his friend dead, he realized that he was the only lucky one.

            In this isolated island, Robinson lived twenty-four years all alone and later tree years with his slave/friend Cuma. Cuma was the first nonwhite, colored important character in British novels. As a result of this, Cuma is very important for the history of the British literature and the people who do not accept themselves as “white”. Robinson called him friend, but he was basically his loyal, friendly slave. Robinson first taught him to call him Master even before he taught him “yes” and “no” in English. He wanted to make Cuma learn English only to make him follow his orders. Before Cuma, he had to do his own works all by himself. Robinson’s adventures in the island are still interesting for many people including me even though it is a perfect symbol of Capitalism and Colonialism. Robinson also tried to teach his “friend” Cuma Christianity and Evil. It was interesting because Cuma was not aware of Evil before. Robinson had a hard time to introduce Evil metaphorically to Cuma. I was very interesting for me.

            According to Jonathan Swift, he wrote Gulliver's Adventures as an answer to Robinson Crusoe individualist and selfish character. From my Turkish Philosophy discussion group, I learned that Robinson is a perfect example for individualism and Capitalist System’s neoclassical Economy. He has been a topic for several major lessons. Robinson’s story was created nearly 500 years later than Hayy bin Yaqzan. If we compare both heroes, Hayy did not try to control the island’s environments under his power. He tried to be one part of that nature. He grew up in that island, which could be the reason for his peaceful character. On the contrary, Robinson was already poisoned by the civilized world. He was an adult when he reached the island. As a result of this, he wanted to copy his old actions in the new island by different ways. He domesticated the animals to have benefits from them. He made a slave from a man who he met after his 24 lonely years in the island. The accidents of these two heroes’ lives were very similar, but their attitudes were totally different.

            In addition, Robinson was not a very good believer until he had these specific experiences on the island. He was arguing with God though his inner voices during his struggle on the island. After a lot of good and bad experiences, he used all the knowledge that he gained from this struggle to have a better communication with God. However, the main attention of Robinson was about controlling the island. Both of the stories have interesting example of humankind’s courage to survive. From this perspective, they are very heuristic, too.

            There is a nice part of Robinson Crusoe’s back cover:

"In the first place, I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here. I had neither the lust of the eye, or the pride of life. I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying; I was lord of the whole manor... I might call myself king or emperor..." (Robinson Crusoe, Back Cover)

            The people on the earth who are aware of Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe; have learned many different things from these two separate heroes. I personally like Hayy bin Yaqzan because of his view about nature and God. I criticize Robinson Crusoe due to the fact that he saw the land and Cuma as his own. In my daily life because Robinson is better known, I can use him as an example to emphasize my own loneliness in the world metaphorically. I wish more people could read Hayy bin Yaqzan and think about his story. I grew up his story by watching in cartoon version. I still keep the taste of the story in my soul’s abstract tongue.

 Mute Translator-Meryem