Barry Estabrook wrote a book called Tomatoland.  It is not necessarily the type of book that I would normally read, but I heard the author on a radio talk show, and he captured my imagination.  Not because of my great love for tomatoes, but because he explained some things about the working conditions of the tomato pickers.

He explained that he was visiting his father in Naples, Florida when hard green missiles began falling off the truck in front of him and bouncing across the road.  He had first assumed that they were green apples, but because his passion is food and his curiosity was aroused, he pulled over, picked up one of these foreign objects and discovered that it was, in fact, a tomato.

Although this fruit/vegetable had fallen out of a truck going the speed limit on a Florida four lane, and although it had bounced across the highway, when he began looking at the fallen tomatoes, he saw no nicks, no dents, no cracks and no significant scratches.  Obviously, they were bred to be transported.

I’m not going to continue writing about the tomato itself or the extremely detailed account of the Florida Tomato Growers except for one particular section that deals with those people who live every day in those tomato fields.  People who are exposed to “Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical applications.   All of this is happening in plain view, but out of sight, only a half-hour’s drive from one of the wealthiest areas in the United States with its estate homes, beachfront condominiums, and gated golf communities.”

Estabrook goes on to describe the horrific birth defects of the children being born from those pregnant female workers who have worked in the fields during the insecticide spraying, and the sheer abuse that these workers suffer from at the hands of the tomato growers.  The most devastating examples of this abuse, however, come in the sections describing the fact that over the past decade and a half, numerous mid-management picker bosses have been arrested and prosecuted for actually holding immigrants as slaves, in chains, within high fenced areas and then buying and selling them to other mid-management picker bosses.

So, let’s recap, we are growing rock hard green tomatoes that can roll off of a truck at 65 mph, not bruise or break, are gassed to turn them red, are submitted to seven or eight times more chemicals than in California and that are picked, in the most extreme cases by SLAVES.  Oh, yeah, and they taste like cardboard . . . or worse.

It simply puts this whole IPad manufacturing issue into perspective when we cry out about working conditions in other countries.  Do we really want to know how old the little girls are who weave our Persian carpets, make our tennis shoes, or sew our suits?  Do we really want to know what it costs to hire someone to pick something by hand in a field?  Do we really care if the million and billionaires who run this country are paying taxes at the same level that we are?  It’s always been very interesting to me as to what we ignore.  In healthcare for example:

What is the infection rate at the hospital where you are going for surgery?

How about the patient or employee satisfaction rate is?

Or the re-admission rate for patients?

Do you know if your doc has a file with the National Physician Data Bank?

Or what his or her success ratio is for the type of surgery you’re having?

Probably not . . . but now, at least you know a little more about those rock hard tomatoes you’re eating in the winter!

Maybe, little by little, we’ll know where to look to protect ourselves and our fellow human beings.

Marvin Hamlisch died last week at the age of 68.  When I first heard the news, it was strangely surreal to me, not because he died, that is, afterall, the ultimate journey for all of us, but because he represented so much of the music that had been and will be part of us forever.  As I mentioned his passing to friends, the reaction was mixed, usually sympathetic, not very nostalgic and, for the most part, clueless.  “Who was Marvin Hamlisch?” “What did he do?”  “Hmmmm, okay, I knew that song,  that’s too bad he died.”  This struck me as a sad testament to at least the focus of my generation’s knowledge of greatness in the arts and it pointed out to me that, I’m still an honest to goodness music geek at heart.

What did Hamlisch do during his lifetime?  Well, for one thing, he won Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, Grammys, Golden Globes and even a Pulitzer Prize for his work.   In fact, he was recognized as the only composer who won all of these awards from every different arena of entertainment.  He created the music from everything from the “Sting,” to “Ice Castles,” “A Chorus Line,” “The Way We Were,” “Sunshine, Lollipops and Roses,” and the themes for “Late Night with David Letterman” and “Good Morning America.”  Oh, and don’t forget “Three Men and a Baby,” “The Informant,” “Sophie’s Choice,”  and literally dozens of others.

His musical, “A Chorus Line” was the first reality musical, a musical that “swept audiences off their feet and created a demand for tickets so huge that the show ran seemingly forever.”  As a musical, it ran longer than anything had ever run on Broadway.   Oh, yeah, and in his spare time, he had been the director of the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Pops Orchestra for the past 17 years.  That’s right, Pittsburgh.  Well, he did direct a few other pops orchestras: Milwaukee, San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Buffalo, the National Symphony and the Pasadena Symphony and Pops.

“So, who cares,” some of you might ask, and there-in is the problem.  Who cares, indeed?  If you’re over 40, and none of these songs ever moved you in any way, then I’d suggest that you’re probably right to feel detached from the loss of this unbelievable talent, but if, like me, all of his music is tucked somewhere deep in your memories, your spirit, and your heart, then you have to realize that, unlike the untimely demise of a retired athlete, Marvin Hamlisch was a creative genius who never stopped creating, composing and delivering his own rare form of beauty to this planet, and he is gone.

In our efforts to understand and deal with Mother Nature, we have invented, engineered, and manipulated her in ways that often produce unexpected results. There is currently a drought in the Midwest that is devastating small farmers all across the Plains. In fact, the experts are saying that it is the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. The difference this time, however, is that genetically engineered crops are still squeaking through. You see, by altering the gene make-up of our food, companies like Monsanto have been able to engineer corn that can resist insects and continue to thrive on much smaller amounts of water.

The skeptics might be asking, “What happens when you mess with Mother Nature,” and, not unlike my daily diet of unrelated pharmaceuticals, we know that there may be ramifications, but we don’t know exactly what those effects might be. For example, we know for sure that if you take five pills a day for different ailments, there is a 100% chance that they will interact with each other. What we don’t know, because they were made by different manufacturers to address different ailments is what that interaction may be.

Recently, a friend of mine posted a photo of the vascularization of the heart, and it was placed beside another photo of the Amazon River water basin. To the untrained eye, the complex network of the blood vessels of the heart looked exactly like the map of the river’s connecting creeks and streams. In fact, a few years ago I saw a presentation by a radiologist who had read over 1,000,000 mammograms. He was also an amateur botanist, and for every image that he showed depicting a malignancy, he had a corresponding image of flower and plant formations in nature that was almost indiscernible from the cancers, an ironic contrast of the beauty and cruelty of Nature.

A further exploration of this inner connectedness was the recent story on NPR about an Italian wine maker, a microbiologist, Duccio Cavalieri, who had clarified the connecting by which insects ( in this case a wasp) transfer yeast from their guts onto wine grapes. This wasp yeast then shares in the fermenting of the wine. This interconnectedness explains some of the centuries old complexities in taste in the wines from Chianti. In fact, since the Roman era, vineyard owners knew that their wines would be impacted by planting flowers around the vineyards.

The story elaborated on the concerns of Ann Pringle, an Evolutionary Biologist at Harvard, related to the unintended penalties of a smaller amount of species diversity once that diversity is lost. In other words, the yeast from the wasps digestive juices makes the wine taste amazing. If a wasp biting into a grape can change the taste of your wine, what happens when you change Mother Nature’s corn by genetic engineering?

Ironically, one of the things that happens is that the corn stalks on this altered corn become bigger, stronger and tougher than regular corn. In fact, the corn stalks are so strong that, once they are cut down at the end of the growing season, they literally rip into the tractor tires as they drive over them. Consequently, the tractors with eight tires that average about $1000 each are taking a real beating when they drive through these Super Corn fields. This has resulted in tire manufacturers and post- manufacturers hardeng the rubber and, in fact, adding Kevlar to them, the stuff from which they make bullet proof vests.

So, we feed our cows, pigs and chickens genetic corn, kill the wasps by spraying them, and place bullet proof vest materials inside our tires. It seemed so much simpler when all we had to do as kids was to hang out with farmers where we could eat, drink and enjoy Mother Nature’s best any day of the week. Little did we know.