Oranges

"Oranges is a model for a certain type of journalism. Big food companies do not want you to know how your food is produced and who produces it. They want you to just think about it as something that arrives in your supermarket already wrapped up. This book is a model for me. Every day on his way to work McPhee passed through the train station in New York City and there was this place where you could go and they had a bin full of oranges and a machine and they would squeeze you a glass of orange juice while you waited. “Big food companies do not want you to know how your food is produced and who produces it.” McPhee started to think about that and decided that he would basically follow that glass of freshly squeezed juice back to where the orange was produced. He wanted to find out all about it, the history of that type of farming. It is a short book and it is not a political book in that he is not beating any drums, he is just telling you how it is done. And you come away never being able to look at an orange in the same way again. You will look at it and know about the people who grow it who have financial problems. And it will no longer be a pretty waxed orange sitting in front of you. Like I said, I think the big food industry goes out of its way to hide these things. I focused on the winter tomato from Florida and discovered tasteless tomatoes compared to a tomato of 50 years ago. They are harvested when they are green and then exposed to ethylene gas, which makes them obligingly turn the right colour. Ethylene is a gas that the leaves of a tomato plant emit naturally when the fruit is ripe. Yes, one of the tomato growers that I was talking to told me that the supermarket shopper does not taste the tomatoes before she buys them. She buys them with her eyes. He was also the one that said he doesn’t get paid a cent for taste or nutrition, he gets paid by the pound. So I discovered that since the 1970s plant breeders for commercial tomatoes have focused almost solely on yield. That is what they got paid for, so taste and nutrition got lost. Another thing I found out was that a horrific amount of chemicals have to be used to grow tomatoes successfully in Florida because the conditions there are not right for growing them naturally. The climate is far too humid for tomato-growing conditions, which need to be dry and sunny like in Italy. All too often the workers are affected by the huge amount of pesticides going on the tomatoes. That leads in some cases to birth defects and cancers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I was also really shocked to find out that there is still abject slavery in the United States. And this isn’t just occasional. There have been seven major cases brought to justice in the last 15 years. I am talking about people being bought and sold and shackled in chains at night to keep them from escaping. This is all in the court records, written down. Fortunately, very recently, some fundamental changes have been made in the relationship between the people who grow and raise tomatoes and the people who work for them, which could improve a lot of these conditions. The Workers Rights Group has been working for years to bring about these changes and they actually came to pass last year. So at least there is a mechanism in place that can deal with a lot of the labour abuses that are going on. Workers have time clocks in the fields to show how long they are working – they never used to. There is a grievance procedure. So the template has now been built and it looks like things could become much better."