Check out the folks and recipes as The Perennial Plate, they are dedicated to sustainable and adventurous eating, traveling around gathering recipes and talking to folks who fish, hunt, pick tomatoes, and learning from them about where food comes from and how it is prepared.
Please watch Episode Lupe Gonzalo, tomato picker and activist with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida. As Barry Estabrook wrote in his book, Tomatoland: “Any American who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave. That is not an assumption, it is a fact (Douglas Molloy, US Attorney for Florida’s Middle District).” “Immokalee,” as Estabrook continues. “Is the town that tomatoes built.” Florida supplies 1/3 of America's tomatoes.
From the article that accompanies the 5 minute film, "...each bucket of tomatoes a worker fills (roughly 32-35 lbs) still gets them around only $0.45. Forty Five Cents. And they are picking green tomatoes — as in, tomatoes that are not ripe. If you live in Florida and ever find yourself behind a tomato truck, you probably wouldn’t know it as the fruit is completely unrecognizable. The tomatoes are picked green so that they can be gassed with chemicals to turn red and then shipped to other areas of the country." One question: Why do we want to eat tomatoes in winter that taste like styrofoam?
And for another kind of activism, check out The International Supper Club, two folks riding their bikes 15,000 miles across Eurasia, documenting people and what they eat.
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