This past March, I had the opportunity to attend the Agricultural Missions annual meeting in Florida. (For more on AgMissions check out their website at http://www.agriculturalmissions.org ). As part of the meeting, we took a trip to a major tomato packing plant. It was exciting to me to be part of a group that was not only willing, but excited, to visit “the enemy”.

About 45 of us piled into vans and drove out to Immokalee, one of the homes of tomato production in the US. We arrived and we granted easy access thanks to the preparations made by Stephen Bartlett. He had called ahead and told the folks at the plant that we were an international economic delegation who were interested in the tomato industry.

We piled out of the vans and were met by the plant’s foreman, a hulking, ruddy man. He led us along the side of the building to the place where tomatoes arrived from the field. Standing in front of the stacks of crates of green tomatoes…

…he told us proudly how many millions of tomatoes the plant could handle each day.

From the unloading area we walked inside the building, passing along the way the places where the incoming tomatoes were washed and waxed.

Walking into the plant we found ourselves on the grading floor, where the employees would sit for hours a day, grading out the tomatoes.

Grading is a process where tomatoes are separated by “quality”. This quality check is purely visual, those tomatoes that are most perfectly softball shaped and smooth are worthy of grade A, and find their way onto supermarket shelves. Less worthy tomatoes find their way into cans, sauces, and salsa.

From the floor we climbed up to a catwalk with a better view of the grading area. We could see the long rows of stools huddled along the conveyor belts.

Standing in that place, one really got the sense that the workers in this plant were cogs in the machine in the truest sense.

We moved along through the plant, finishing at the cavernous garages where tomatoes are gassed. The foreman proudly explained that their customers often approached them with a particular color red they wanted, and that they were able to perfectly match that color. We were also informed that an automated system moved the tomatoes from grading, into boxes, which were moved by forklift into the gas chambers.

This fact prompted Don Zasada to ask a question that rings in my ears still. Innocently he asked “So when the tomatoes get graded, that’s the only time they get touched by human hands in this plant?”. The answer was an indifferent “Yup”.