Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

Author:Barry Estabrook [Estabrook, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: food
ISBN: 9781449408411
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC
Published: 2011-06-07T00:00:00+00:00


One of the reasons that rents are so high in Immokalee is that many workers lack vehicles and must live within walking distance of the downtown pick-up areas where crew leaders’ buses stop each morning and evening. The busiest of these is a football-field-size parking lot in front of La Fiesta, a sprawling building housing a supermarket, taqueria, deli, and check-cashing outfit. I arrived there a little before five o’clock in the morning, which would have made me a slacker among tomato workers. The place was already bustling. A dozen amateurishly repainted school buses with hand lettering on their sides saying “Montano Harvesting” or “A. and J. Field Services” sat in the yellowish glare of the streetlights. Several women stood beside the opened backs of SUVs selling tacos and tamales to workers, who appeared out of the shadows along a web of sandy paths leading from the trailers. The scene was eerily quiet, except when the local population of roosters erupted in vigorous crowing contests. I stopped at a group of about ten guys sitting on top of a picnic table. One of them told me that they waited there every day for a crew leader who had hired them for the season. As regular members of a crew, these workers represented the highest social class in that predawn gathering. But hundreds of other men with no certain prospects had lined up. Their only hope for work was if a crew was shorthanded or a farmer was in desperate need of a group of temporary pickers. This group was the lowest of the low—the bottom of the bottom of the American labor force. By seven o’clock, the sky began to lighten. The number of buses coming and going slowed, and then stopped. Several dozen men still milled around the lot, hoping that a crew leader might have been delayed or would be summoned at the last moment to harvest a field. But it soon became apparent that there would be no more buses that morning. The men straggled off toward the trailers, thermoses and plastic grocery bags full of lunch slung over their slumped shoulders, shuffling their feet even more wearily than the workers who got off the buses that evening after a full day in the fields.

Later that same morning, I saw a few of the men who had gone away without work when I volunteered to put in a shift at the Guadalupe Center soup kitchen. The Guadalupe Center is a charitable organization whose mission is to “serve the migrant and rural poor of Immokalee.” It operates a clothing room, where donated garments, toys, and small appliances are sold at a rate of one dollar per full shopping bag—a fee put in place when the organization found that paying a dollar allowed customers to maintain their pride and increased use of the room. It also runs a shower program, providing fresh towels, clean clothes, and toiletries so that workers without access to plumbing can maintain their hygiene as well as their dignity.



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