Summer in San Francisco is here, and if you listen carefully, you will hear a cry from locavores: “The tomatoes are here!” Our farmers’ market tomatoes usually start with small cherry tomatoes, which burst in your mouth, and as we head into August, you’ll start seeing larger tomatoes, which are perfect for salads, finally culminating in tomato abundance in September, which is the time that many of us start our canning projects.

But tomatoes that we get at our local farmers’ markets are not the norm. Much of the $5 billion tomato industry in the United States focuses on providing tomatoes to consumers year-round. This consumer demand comes at a steep price; supermarket tomatoes are usually tasteless, artificially ripened, and picked by farmworkers who are treated unjustly and exposed to extreme levels of pesticides.

Join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco where we delve into the story of tomatoes, including labor rights and the successes of the Campaign for Fair Food, heirloom varieties of tomatoes, and a discussion about tomato research being conducted at the University of California, Davis.

When: Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Where: Viracocha, 998 Valencia Street at 21st Street, San Francisco
Food and drink at 6:30 pm; Discussion at 7:00 pm

Joining us for our panel discussion will be:

Fred Hempel. Hempel is the owner of Sunol-based Baia Nicchia Farm & Nursery, known by chefs, home gardeners, and tomato enthusiasts for their large variety of heirloom tomatoes. The farm, on San Francisco Water Department land in Sunol, is host to over 100 varieties of tomatoes that have been grown specifically for the many microclimates of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Damara Luce. Luce is the national coordinator of Just Harvest USA, and worked and lived in Immokalee, Florida for over seven years, working closely with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to bring to light the injustices of tomato farming in Florida. She aims to build a more just and sustainable food system with a focus on establishing fair wages, humane working condition, and fundamental rights for farmworkers.

Emma Torbert. Torbert is a post-graduate fellow working at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, and works there on the Russell Ranch project, a farm where 180,000 pounds of processing tomatoes are grown each year for research purposes. Through the Russell Ranch project, data is being collected on different varietals, trends in yield, nutritional content, environmental impact, and efficiency in use of water.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Seasonal snacks and refreshments generously provided by Village Market, Bi-Rite Market, and Shoe Shine Wine.

Photo caption: Heirloom tomato, Baia Nicchia Farm.

You would never participate in slavery, right?

I know, it seems like a bizarre question in this day and age–of course no sane, civilized member of a modern society would take part in the indentured servitude of others. Lincoln ended all that 150 years ago, didn’t he? And of course you and I would never have anything to do with slavery in 2010.

The dirty little secret though is that millions of Americans are contributing to it each week and they don’t even know it. When you buy tomatoes at the local Publix, Ahold, Kroger, or Walmart, you become the last link in a chain that is attached to shackles in south Florida. We all know Walmart especially is well known for their tireless efforts to force suppliers to keep costs down for everything they buy. One of the results of this kind of business practice is that the wage that pickers are paid for those tomatoes has not gone up for more than 30 years. That wage is $0.45 per bucket of picked green tomatoes, or $0.0145 per pound. And that’s for the ones who actually do get paid.

Since 1993 the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been working unstintingly to improve these situations, with much success (such as seven convictions for slavery in the last 13 years), but there is still a long way to go. Following on the heels of their victorious boycotts of Yum! Brands’ Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway, they also concluded successful negotiations with Whole Foods and BAMCO. Eric Schlosser called their talks with Compass Group “the greatest victory for farmworkers since Cesar Chavez in the 1970′s.” But the work is nowhere near complete.

Earlier this year the CIW launched the Florida Modern Day Slavery Museum, an exhibit mounted on the back of a cargo truck like the one used to imprison farmworkers in the 2008 US v. Navarette slavery conviction. It has been touring the country, and will be touring parts of the Florida, Georgia, and Alabama later this month.

Now the CIW is turning its attention to those big grocery chains in an effort to get them, like the fast food chains before them, to commit to paying an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes they sell and to verify that the extra cent goes directly to the pickers. To help spread the word about this campaign, IATP Food and Society Fellows Shalini Kantayya and Sean Sellers have collaborated on a video that sums up the situation nicely.

The migrant labor issue is the vital subtext of America’s ongoing immigration debate. You may have seen the recent attention paid to it by Stephen Colbert and the “Take our Jobs” campaign.  Some of the workers in and around Immokalee are undocumented, most are here legally. Either way though, surely we can agree that they are all deserving of basic human rights while Washington works (or not) on the larger immigration reform debate. You can play your part by spreading the word, and by telling the management of your local grocery that you’ll no longer be a party to slavery, and you hope they won’t either.

Commercially grown strawberries and tomatoes in California could start getting an unhealthy dose of the highly toxic fumigant methyl iodide, a known carcinogen, neurotoxin, and thyroid disruptor. Among scientists’ greatest concerns is the pesticide’s ability to cause spontaneous abortion late in pregnancy. So you might be surprised to hear that the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) recently issued a proposed decision to approve methyl iodide for use just months after a state-commissioned study warned that any agricultural use “would result in exposures to a large number of the public and thus would have a significant adverse impact on the public health” adding that, “adequate control of human exposure would be difficult, if not impossible.”

Strawberries are already near the top of the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen (13 pesticides were detected on a single sample) and recently, a high-level Presidential Cancer Panel recommended reducing chemical exposure by choosing fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers (i.e., organic).

According to Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first registered methyl iodide as a pesticide in 2007, despite a letter of protest [PDF] sent by prominent scientists and Nobel laureates to the agency saying that it’s “astonishing” that the EPA is considering “broadcast releases of one of the more toxic chemicals used in manufacturing into the environment.” EPA initially limited its approval, registering methyl iodide for just one year. Then, during the final months of the Bush Administration, EPA quietly removed the time limits on its decision, effectively giving its manufacturer, Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience, the largest privately-held pesticide producer on the planet, a green light for entry into the U.S. market. Two years later, the EPA agreed to reopen its decision on methyl iodide, pending results of a California Scientific Review Committee. The report, referenced above, was published on DPR’s Web site in February and shortly thereafter, groups from around the country submitted a petition [PDF] to EPA to reopen their decision.

“We are talking about a pesticide that’s been linked to cancer and late-term miscarriages and, because it’s a gas, easily drifts from the fields and into nearby communities,” said Greg Loarie, an attorney for Earthjustice, which filed the petition. “Families who live and work near California’s tomato, strawberry and other fields will be harmed if the state moves forward with this proposal. There are safe alternatives to methyl iodide. There is simply no reason to be subjecting Californians to such serious health risks.”

Methyl iodide was developed as an alternative to the fumigant methyl bromide, a chemical which also has serious health implications and serious environmental impacts, and which is being phased out under the Montreal Protocol. According [PDF] to PANNA, methyl iodide is by some measures four times as toxic as methyl bromide. Despite this, the DPR has decided that further restrictions would make the pesticide safe enough for use. These include requiring site-specific licenses, limiting exposure for workers and people living nearby to one-half and one-fifth, respectively, of the EPA’s regulatory target levels, increasing buffer zones, and limiting the rate and extent to which the fumigant can be used. “The extra, health-protective use restrictions we are proposing … are much stricter than those imposed anywhere else in the United States,” said DPR director Mary-Ann Warmerdam. Still, the facts remain that methyl iodide is chemically reactive and highly volatile, making its application, even in the best of circumstances, clearly not in the public interest. While the California Strawberry Growers Commission has yet to make its position known on the matter, Salinas Valley conventional strawberry growers apparently welcome the approval–strawberries were a $600 million, 10,449-acre crop there in 2008.

And just in case you thought this might be about whether you can still buy cheap strawberries at Costco, PANNA has put together a superb document, Profiles of Poison [PDF], detailing the personal stories of individuals impacted by pesticides who are saying no to methyl iodide. From the farmworker rushed to the hospital with severe chemical blistering and in need of respiratory support, to the pregnant mother who lost her baby only two days after being exposed to pesticide dew, these are the stories of people who have lived through the pain and trauma of pesticide poisoning and are speaking out to prevent others from suffering the same fate.

The DPR is accepting public comments on its proposal through June 14, so unless you’d like some more toxins with your strawberry smoothie, you might want to urge DPR to immediately withdraw the recommendation to approve its agricultural use. CREDO has a one-step simple petition you can sign to make your opposition heard as well.

Many gardeners are currently pulling up plants and preparing beds for fall. They are laying parts of their garden to rest while their squash lay about, curing in the sun. Some gardeners are already turning their backs on their plots and projecting their green minds through winter and into next spring. But fall is not the time for complacency in the garden. It’s a great time to sneak in some late plantings of lettuce and greens—and it’s the ripest time of year to save some seeds.

Saving seeds sustains us. It is a cultural activity, one that connects us to 12,000 years of the most essential human tradition. Saving seeds also connects us to our familiar food plants in new ways, teaching us to appreciate each plant’s full life cycle from seed to seed. Now, more than ever, saving seeds is also a political act—a good garden practice that doubles as agricultural activism.

While many eaters have begun to connect with local farmers, seek out foods grown with no chemicals, and grow a garden of their own, the farmers who grow seed are an often overlooked part of the concept of sustainable agriculture. Just as the plants we eat have full-circle life cycles, the sustainability concept is most complete when viewed as a full circle. If we leave out one piece, such as the source of our seeds, it’s not truly sustainable. The next step for creating local food systems involves reaching beyond the farmer-consumer connection and exploring all of the people and industries that contribute to food production.

Saving seeds is a simple and enjoyable art that resists corporate monopolies, the dominance of hybrids and GMOs, the destructive power of industrial agriculture, and the patenting of life. So how do you save seeds and the world?

Choose your seed sources carefully. Start by planting open-pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrids or GMOs. You can’t save seeds from a hybrid, plant them, and expect to grow the same variety. This means that growers become entirely dependent on the company that created the hybrid and must purchase their seeds from this company every year. In terms of sustainability, hybrids create a dependence on financially and environmentally costly industrial agriculture systems—which are behind nearly all hybrid seeds. As for GMOs, which are the most hi-tech of all seeds, expensive technology and high chemical inputs are required for their creation and cultivation. It’s entirely illegal to save seeds from GMO plants and unlawful to attempt to reproduce hybrid varieties with proprietary licenses. Not all garden seed catalogs will say which of their varieties are hybrids (F1) or where and how they were grown. Make sure you are getting your original seeds from responsible sources by choosing seed companies that are upfront about offering open-pollinated or heirloom varieties.

Exercise self-control. Although harvesting food, for many plants, interrupts their life-cycle, seed saving and eating go hand in hand. It’s not an either/or choice. So harvest some for your taste buds and leave some of your plants to do their thing. It’s hard to resist picking a full bunch of Prizehead lettuce in its prime, but rein in your appetite and let several plants bolt and flower. Don’t worry— you won’t miss out on your Rose de Berne Tomato sandwich.

Be brave in your garden. Learning a new skill can be intimidating, but the rewards of becoming a seed saver are many. Don’t worry about doing everything by the books. The most successful seed savers start with an attitude of curiosity and experimentation. By carefully observing your plants through their entire life-cycle, you will learn a lot about how they create seeds. Each season try something new and repeat your successful practices from the year before. Bravery in the garden leads to a deeper understanding of our favorite plants and reveals moments of seedy beauty and bounty many gardeners have never experienced.

Cross-pollinate. Although you have lots of vegetative company in your garden, it can sometimes be an isolating experience. You are not alone. There are great gardening resources close at hand. Community gardens, neighbors, relatives, and farmer’s markets are all teaming with growing knowledge. For seed saving, books like Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth and Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carole Deppe are excellent resources. Scout around and take a local seed saving workshop or visit an open house at a seed grower’s farm. The internet is another resource for learning more, and a few seed companies are now posting seed saving info on their websites. In the long run, connecting in real time with other gardeners and farmers creates community and fosters an interdependence that strengthens local food networks.

Make your politics practical. Food politics is not just about reading articles and sharing them on Twitter or having inspired rants with friends- although these discursive acts help raise awareness. Food politics is a practice. Knowing how your food was grown and who grew it is the first big step. Being aware of the who, where, and how of the seeds behind the veggies is the next step. More than ever, making the transition from being a consumer to producing food—and seed— for yourself and your community is a political act.

Here’s how we save tomato seeds for the Hudson Valley Seed Library catalog.

Two weeks ago, I noticed that two of my tomato plants had late blight. I was up on the roof, weeding, pulling off yellowing leaves from all the excess rain, and harvesting some early tomatoes when I noticed leaves with yellow and brown spots on them. I’d read the article in the New York Times about the blight, and so I sent out the photo on the left to Twitter, asking my followers, “is this the blight?” The answer, sadly, was yes. So I pulled one plant up, before it could spread to the others, and took all the leaves off the other plant which was confined to a corner, hoping to let it’s three giant tomatoes ripen.

Unfortunately, rooftops are not immune from the soil disease that ravages spuds and tomatoes — I bought my seedlings from two small nurseries upstate, which had grown them locally. But it is possible that contamination had already spread to my tomatoes from the nurseries’ neighbors who bought their plants at big box stores like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, which sold plants in soil from an Alabama facility that carried the blight. Ironically, it is new growers’ enthusiasm that might have exacerbated the disease through increased consumer demand. And while a record number of people are growing some of their own produce this year, excess rain in the northeast has created the perfect conditions for the blight to flourish — but it is small organic farmers that are taking a punch.

Last week I spoke to some of the farmers at the Union Square farmer’s market. Three of my favorite sustainable farms are not spraying, even though it means a losses of up to $25,000. It’s a depressing worse case scenario. Amy Hepworth, the farmer at Hepworth Farms (my CSA) and Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics, both places from whom I normally get beautiful tomatoes for eating and canning, have sustained big losses this year. Another of my favorites farms, known for their tomatoes, has decided to spray to save their harvest — for the first time in 14 years. It’s hard to tell farmers not to spray. As M.K. Wyle wrote on Civil Eats last week, its painful to watch all of that work be destroyed in one fell swoop.

So what can be done, and is this just the farmer’s gambit? On my rooftop, I’ve planted salad greens and kale in the place of my missing tomatoes. But for small farms, most of which grow diverse crops and often don’t qualify for disaster insurance, such a loss could put them further into debt and make their ability to grow in the future uncertain. It is possible that had plants been grown from seed nearby, and soil stayed in its region, we wouldn’t see the blight spreading like it is through the northeast. So should small farms bear the brunt of the burden alone?

Governor Paterson doesn’t think so. He requested recently that the USDA designate 17 New York counties as agricultural disaster areas. If these counties get this designation, low-interest loans will be made available based on the extent of the losses.

But loans aren’t ideal. I’m glad that the option is there, but how about better supports in Washington for diversified growers, who support a healthier population and healthier soil? Loans are more like a band-aid, after the fact. Growers of cotton, soy, wheat, corn and other non-perishable commodities are protected because they are the biggest producers, and as such have the most detailed crop histories, lobbies, and of course that longer shelf life.

Getting crop insurance is based on data sets and tables which are essentially a history of a certain crop’s performance. According to Scott Marlow, of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, there is precious little information being gathered on USDA-designated “specialty crops” (around 10 million acres planted according to the 2007 census, a fraction of the total 310 million acres planted in the US), like tomatoes, and so it’s harder for these farmers to get coverage. It is also harder for them to get loans, which are often based on crop insurance.

Furthermore, planting restrictions put in place by the federal government aim to keep specialty crops at that 10 million acres so as to control prices. If a farmer shifts from commodity crops to specialty crops, they lose the payments on their land. All of this means that a farmer has to feel really passionate about diversified growing, because they are managing their own risk most of the time. And the growth of the local food movement gets stifled by these realities, too.

But I would argue that the farmers growing perishable fruits and vegetables are our insurance policy against future preventable disease; that, in fact, our health is rooted in this issue.

I may be able to withstand losses in my little plot, (an experiment in growing, really) but small farmers cannot. Let’s change the inherant unfairness in our system that favors big over small farms by pushing the goverment to re-evaluate these policies. Indeed, the future of local food is at stake.

I have an entire cookbook devoted to tomatoes.  Admittedly, I have a lot of cookbooks, but tomatoes are the only vegetable in my kitchen with an entire cookbook singing their praises.  But then, they are tomatoes, the crown of the summer growing season and the crop that can make or break a small vegetable farm.  Every strange vegetable from kohlrabi to escarole has its devoted fans, but tomatoes are as much of an American summer institution as baseball and 4th of July fireworks. Tomatoes are the crop that everyone is waiting for.

For those of us living in the Northeast this year, if could be a long wait.  Earlier this summer, tomato transplants sold in Lowes, Walmart, and Home Depot carried the spores of Phytophthora infestans (literally “plant destroyer” in Latin) into the Northeast, where a cool, wet summer provided ideal conditions for an epidemic.  Phytophthora infestans, more commonly referred to as late blight, is an incredibly contagious plant disease, which can knock out entire fields of tomatoes and potatoes in a matter of days.  Late blight was the cause of the infamous Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century—this is a plant disease which means business.

Normally, late blight does not affect the Northeast, as cold winters prevent any spores from wintering over.  In the south, where late blight can survive winter, the high heat of summer holds the blight in check and prevents the total crop loss that Northeastern farmers now dread.  What happened this year is the worst case scenario only possible in an industrialized food system.  The disease overwintered in an Alabama nursery, which then shipped infected plants to the Northeast and spread the blight far more quickly and ubiquitously than the disease ever could have traveled on its own.

At the farm where I am working, late blight has been creeping ever nearer for the last two weeks: first it was in all the states surrounding Massachusetts, then it was in nearby counties, then it was here, in Berkshire county, until Friday, when my boss, Don, found the first blighted tomato on our farm.  We had eaten our first cherry tomatoes on Monday.

I’m sure that to a non-grower, this all seems a bit histrionic.  And it is true, no one has died, nor has the farm been hit by a catastrophic natural disaster.  Many of our other crops are flourishing, despite the seeming perma-cloud that has been draping our state as of late.  And we’ll get a harvest of potatoes, albeit a much smaller and less storage-worthy one.  But remember this: we’ve put more hours into these two crops than any others: we built an entire hoop house for tomatoes this spring, showered our transplants with attention, mulched 2800 feet of tomato beds with straw, trellised all of the tomatoes at least three times, and in the potatoes, we’ve spent hours scouting for Colorado potato beetles and picking them off by hand.  Our crops are thriving, or were, before Friday.  All of our plants were uncommonly healthy and robust, flowering and fruiting with verdant abandon.

With the blight in our fields, though, we know what comes next.  Brown spots and downly fungus on the leaves, black spots on the stems, rotting green fruit, and a lot of empty space on the farm.  Every document from every extension office, no matter how green, is sending the same message this summer: spray something (organic or conventional) or lose your tomatoes and potatoes.  There is literally nothing else we can do.  Conventional growers have a number of spraying options; organic growers are permitted to use a copper spray.  On my farm, we won’t spray anything, ever.

For the first time, I can truly understand the desire to spray.  Last year, when bean beetles decimated our green beans and edamame, the thought flickered through my mind, but now, poised on the brink of losing the entire harvest of a crop that on many diversified farms generates 20 or more percent of the annual revenue, I can see what drives a farmer to don a backpack and a mask and start reading chemical warning labels.

For me, however, it was the warning labels that helped me make peace with our decision not to fight.  Here is how one extension service bulletin describes copper fungicide, the certified organic choice (which is only a stopgap measure in terms of effectiveness):

“Corrosive.  Causes irreversible eye damage.  May cause skin sensitization reactions in certain individuals.  Do not get in eyes or on clothing.  Harmful if swallowed or absorbed through the skin.  Avoid contact with skin.  Avoid breathing dust.  Personal protective equipment that applicators and other handlers must wear when using copper is: long-sleeved shirt and long pants, chemical-resistant and waterproof gloves, shoes plus socks, and protective eyewear.  First aid information is also provided on labels for accidental exposure, know this in advance to avoid delay in treatment.”

I recently received an email from a friend apprenticing on a nearby farm, where they had chosen to fight the blight by spraying.  “Ethically, I’m opposed to spraying “ she wrote, “yet I helped [my manager] initiate a spray plan and spent ten hours with a mask and backpack.  That felt like sin.  At some point I spotted infected potatoes.  That was hard to break to her…”

Farmers who spray preventatively—once a week, or more often if there is rain—stand a chance of wringing a harvest out of this terrible season.  As the only folks with local tomatoes, they’ll be able to charge unheard of prices for them.  At the same time, those sprays will be slowly nurturing stronger, more virulent strains of the blight.  My farm is a CSA farm, so the loss of our tomatoes won’t mean financial ruin (unless angry shareholders boycott next year due to this season’s tomato failure).  Other farmers depend on the tomatoes for financial solvency.  They are good farmers; they have done everything sustainably, with sweat and skill and passion.  Do they spray, against everything that they believe in, or accept a massive financial hit in an already challenging year?

On Friday night, after receiving the bad news, I walked down to our plum tomatoes, to the small empty spot where my manager had removed the first telltale plants.  The neighboring tomatoes still stood tall and strong, and a heady tomato perfume hung over that section of the field.  This is a tragic reality check for young farmers, that our path is not always hard work leading linearly to good eating.  But it need not spell the end of our dreams or indeed of the local food movement.  Now more than ever, Northeastern farmers need the support of their customers.  They need CSA members with the grace to accept why their tomatoes are missing this year and market-goers who understand the devil’s bargain many farmers were forced to make.    This is a year that can teach young agrarians humility and restraint and gratitude, if we can bring ourselves to seek it.

Photos: heirlooms by clayirving, late blight on leaves by jmignault