A bad taste in your mouth

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.”

Bravo to Gourmet magazine for taking this issue on. I remember reading something about this a couple of years ago, when Burger King and other fast-food joints were in the news saying there was absolutely nothing they could do about this: Hey, we just buy the tomatoes, we can’t control how those companies operate. Since then there have been incremental changes, it seems — but not nearly, nearly enough.