I'm writing this post about tomatoes with a sad and heavy heart. And this while I would have preferred to write something from a completely different point of view. Something light and bubbly about the beautiful red-with-some-green Southern Italian tomatoes that I bought yesterday at one of the big Amsterdam food wholesalers, for example. And also about how maybe things are changing, here in The Netherlands, as far as the availability of better, tastier tomatoes is concerned.
I couldn't proceed with my writing plans, no way, since this morning my culinary enthousiasm received an abrupt virtual cold shower.
After turning on my laptop I started surfing on the site of L'Espresso, one of the best Italian opinion magazines, and read an article about the so-called "red gold", as tomatoes are often called.
The tomato season in Souther Italy is at its peak right now and journalist Fabrizio Gatti has spent a week under cover among the tomato pickers in the region Puglia (where I grew up) working with them to gather some writing material for a shocking reportage.
Nowadays - already for many years, actually - Italian tomatoes don't get picked by the Italians themselves but by the so-called extracomunitari, the foreign workers coming from several African and Eastern European countries. During his "field" research, Gatti discovered how these workers get treated as total slaves. During the whole tomato season they pick the juicy red fruits under the fierce Apulian sun, day in day out for 3-4 euro an hour, from 6 in the morning to 10 in the night. In Apulia, summer temperatures can easily reach 42°C.
These modern slaves get battered from the caporali, who guard the tomato fields and decide who's gonna get work and at what price, don't get enough food and water, get constantly insulted by the guardians and field owners and, in the case of some female workers, are used as "payment" to get work for their boyfriends and husbands. No sex with the owner, no work. For "only" 50 euros a month they sleep on dirty mattresses on the ground in abandoned shacks that in the out of season period are used to keep animals and agricultural equipment. Without toilets and water. For them there's no medical care whatsoever. Gatti even speaks of workers murdered because they dared to buy their food at a local village instead of by the local caporale or for rebelling against the horrible treatment. In brief, these people are treated in a highly inhumane way. And this happens in my rich and "civilized" country in the year 2006. History repeats itself? It sounds like the Dark Ages or like something even worse...
I'm speachless and very sad. And I decided that, for the time being, I'm not gonna write about "better" tomatoes as I recently did on my Dutch weblog. If this is the price humanity has to pay for them, I prefer not to eat any tomatoes. Especially if they're coming from Puglia (but it seems like this happens in Campania, the other big tomato area in Italy, too).
For those who can read Italian, click here to view the online version of Gatti's article.
I've sent an e-mail to the Italian Slow Food organisation to ask them if they have a list of canning industries that don't buy tomatoes from "bad" producers. I definitely hope they do exist, somewhere. And I've also sent an e-mail to the biggest canned tomatoes producers in Italy to ask about their buying policy. I'll keep you posted about their answers.
By the way, the beautiful tomatoes that I just bought look exactly like those on the picture. I don't know what I'm gonna do with them yet, but I suddenly don't feel like eating tomatoes anymore.
Photos: Rocco de Benedictis for L'Espresso
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