I am in Florida visiting my family and heard a horrifying story on Florida Public Radio today.  It was about how a company, Ag-Mart, settled a lawsuit with a couple who worked in Ag-Mart tomato fields in Florida and North Carolina.  The worker couple sued the company after their son was born with no limbs.  The Mexican couple said that the fields were sprayed with pesticides and the workers were sent back into the fields immediately after spraying and on some occassions the company even sprayed while the workers were in the fields.  The mother testified that she was sprayed two to three times a week with pesticides that turned her clothes green and caused her headaches, sore throats and rashes.  The radio story said that there was a gag-order as part of the settlement and did not disclose terms of the settlement. 

The price of tomatoes in the winter Ag-Mart produces Santa Sweet grape tomatoes (I have seen them in Vermont grocery stores) and the controversial Ugli-Ripe tomatoes.  I was a fan of the Ugli-Ripe tomatoes back in 2005 when Gourmet Magazine wrote a short story about how the Florida Tomato Board would not allow the ugli-ripes to be sold outside of the state because they didn't meet the visual requirements for a tomato (perfectly round, firm, and uniformly red).  The ugli-ripe tomatoes had flavor, but that is not one of the criteria for saleable tomatoes according to the Florida Tomato Board.  But alas, little did I know what they were doing to the tomatoes and the workers responsible for growing and harvesting them...they are not organic, but they actually looked somewhat like a real tomato which is what I found appealing.

As I sit here in the hospice unit with my dying father I have to wonder how pesticides, herbicides, and the Green Revolution played into his declining health over the past five years.  He, like most people, didn't give a lot of thought to what he was eating, nor did my mother who prepared most of his meals.  Organics are seen as something special rather than what we all should be eating.  When my dad and mom grew up in the 30s and 40s there was no such thing as organics because that was the way that most everything was grown.  But, in a "slow boil" that happened over the next five decades food changed.  Food that was grown with chemicals didn't have to be identified as such. 

Fast forward to today and while awareness about chemical additives and treatments is on the rise and more people want information about how their food is grown, you have multinational corporations who control a large majority of the food supply heavily lobbying against labelling food as irradiated, treated with carbon monoxide, GMO-free, and growth-hormone free.  Why can't our food system be transparent?  The food companies will argue that people are not smart enough to know what is good for them and will be "unnecessarily" alarmed if food is honestly labelled.  Ummm, shouldn't we be?  Don't we have a right to know what is in our food and how it is treated. 

How odd it seems to me that grocery stores now have "natural food" sections.  When you think about it, this is a pretty clear statement that the rest of the food in the store is NOT natural.  What if grocery stores had to label unnatural food as such?  I asked my mom why she doesn't buy more organic food.  While she claimed that often the conventional produce looks better than the organic produce (remember the standards for a "Florida" tomato), her biggest reason was that organic produce is usually more expensive.  So, I asked her, "What if the conventional produce was labelled as 'Chemically Grown' and the organic was labelled as 'Grown Without Chemicals.'  Which would you buy then mom?"  She said that she would buy the produce that was grown without chemicals. 

Still the corporate profits continue to skyrocket, as do the executive salaries.  There is no way that the settlement that Ag-Mart paid to the Mexican couple is enough.  What about some community service for the executives of the company?  What about making these senior managers who are responsible enough to collect the big salaries, be more responsible for the actions of their companies?  Donald Long, the president of Ag-Mart admitted to knowing that his company used pesticides shown to cause birth defects in animals during clinical trials.  Yet, in his depostion he said, "It doesn't say on the label do not allow pregnant women to work in this, even though it has the warning that it might cause problems." 

If this guy, Donald Long, could not connect the dots with pesticides being used on the food he company produces, how can he possibly be smart enough to responsibly run a company.  Does this guys ignorance let him off of the hook?  If shareholders are irresponsible enough to let a guy like this run the company, that is one thing.  But it seems to me that criminal charges may be in order. 

It is good that the Mexican family will be able to care for their limbless son for the rest of his life, but what part of this settlement will prevent this from happening again?