Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Rotten TomatoesScandal strikes the tomato-paste industry.
Friday, March 19, 2010, at 11:21 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2248288/pagenum/all/#p2

The feds had been investigating his tomato-processing company for more than 
four years, but Scott Salyer was apparently taken by surprise when the FBI 
nabbed him at JFK Airport last month. Salyer, who flies his own jet, had been 
traveling to Paraguay and Andorra, among other locales, looking for an 
extradition-safe home. He was visiting the United States to see his newborn 
grandson when the investigation closed in on him.

Prosecutors have assembled a mountain of evidence against Salyer and his 
company, SK Foods, including tapes in which the 54-year-old orders his 
underlings to bribe purchasing agents from major food companies such as 
Kraft, Frito-Lay, Safeway, and Cargill. In some of these conversations, he 
sounds more like a mafia don than a prince of tomatoes. After a salesman 
tells Salyer that a buyer at a major food company "needs a retirement 
program," Salyer responds, "How fast are you going to reel in that fish? I 
want that sucker on speed reel." He was trying, desperately and aggressively, 
to keep tomato-paste contracts out of the hands of his rivals and to unload 
paste that was a bit moldy or watered-down.

Tomato paste may seem like too cheap and unalluring a product to inspire such 
underhanded dealing. It's not smack, after all. But having written a book on 
the fruit, I'm not at all surprised that graft has grown out of the tomato 
fields.

*****

Tomato trucks are a fixture of any summertime drive between Los Angeles and 
San Francisco. They barrel down Interstate 5 from the field to the cannery, 
each one trailing two gondolas loaded with 26 tons of tomatoes. A sharp curve 
will jolt a few of the small, oval fruits out of the trailers. When they hit 
the pavement, they bounce.

The bouncing tomato of California is a wonder of science—the fruit of 
breeding programs that began in the 1940s when Jack Hanna, a cranky 
olericulturalist at the University of California-Davis, got the idea of 
designing a tomato sturdy enough to be picked by a machine. Hanna was 
remarkably unsentimental about the old thin-skinned, teardrop-shaped, gooey 
tomato—the type that made a colorful splash when it hit a politician's shirt. 
His tomatoes were hard and uniform and bland-tasting. Canned tomatoes would 
get mixed with spices and condiments "to the point that you don't know what 
the tomato underneath tastes like anyway," he told a reporter in 1977. 
Besides, bland was good for business. "The more bland a food is," Hanna said, 
in a comment that echoes weirdly in an age of overabundance, "the more people 
eat it."

Today, about 90 percent of professionally grown tomatoes in the United States 
are canning or "processing" tomatoes, and nearly all of them are grown in 
California. A single, tiny company that you've never heard of—Morning Star 
Co., based in Woodland, Calif.—produces around one-quarter of all the 
commercially grown tomatoes in America. Most canning tomatoes are then turned 
into concentrated tomato paste. (Though some are diced or sold peeled and 
whole.)

Grown between Bakersfield and Chico from July to November, the tomatoes in a 
given field ripen nearly simultaneously and are harvested by gigantic 
machines that can pick a ton in about 20 seconds. In the 2009 growing season, 
the five big tomato processors (Morning Star, Rio Bravo, SK Foods, Ingomar, 
and Los Gatos) paid farmers about $80 for a ton of tomatoes and earned about 
50 cents for each pound of paste—enough to make a couple of the Ragu 
spaghetti sauce jars that you buy for $3.99 each.

The Big Five have enormous operations, but tight regulations and water 
shortages make it impossible for them to build new canneries. So they must 
run their existing plants with a frightening efficiency. The California 
canneries operate 24/7 during the three- to four-month harvest, in which they 
crank out 12 million tons of paste, stored in large, sterile bins. (The paste 
is sold to brand-name businesses like Heinz, Nabisco, and Kraft, who turn it 
into the ketchup, pizza and spaghetti sauces, salsas, and juices that we 
consume with such gusto.)

Since the bulk processors sell a nearly interchangeable commodity, they're in 
a fierce competition to win customers by producing paste as cheaply as 
possible. Scott Salyer, the tomato kingpin who was arrested in February, was 
being outclassed by his chief rival, and the undisputed champion of tomato 
efficiency, Morning Star Co.'s Chris Rufer. Salyer, it would seem, resorted 
to fighting dirty. To keep Morning Star and other competitors from edging him 
out of deals, prosecutors say he bribed contracting officials. He was also 
litigious—in fact, he sued Morning Star over a lost customer barely two 
months before the FBI raided his offices.

*****

I've spent two years talking with people in the tomato business, and in that 
time I haven't found many willing to volunteer a nice comment about Salyer, 
whose grandfather "Cockeye" Clarence Salyer came to California in 1918 and at 
one time owned 50,000 acres of farmland. The Salyers lost most of their land 
in a battle with the rival Boswell clan. And now he's lost SK Foods, which 
declared bankruptcy last year. Nine of Salyer's employees or the purchasing 
managers they bribed had pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges prior to 
Salyer's arrest. He's being held without bail in Sacramento, facing 20 years 
in prison if convicted.

Salyer's arrest seems to be the climax of the federal investigation, but food 
companies have meanwhile filed class action lawsuits against SK and two other 
big California tomato processors, Ingomar Foods and Los Gatos Foods. The 
lawsuits claim that the three companies conspired to set domestic prices, a 
claim they deny. Ingomar and Los Gatos officials have said they rue the day 
they got involved with Salyer.

If the tomato investigation goes deep enough, other dark secrets might turn 
up. Six years ago, a field manager for Rio Bravo, Jerry Gilbert, committed 
suicide in the middle of a legal conflict. A farmer had sued Gilbert, 
claiming that in previous years—when Gilbert was still working for Morning 
Star—he requested what amounted to bribes in exchange for a tomato-growing 
contract. Then, according to the farmer, Gilbert stiffed him.

Gilbert's job was to buy tomatoes from farmers in an area measuring several 
hundred square miles around Morning Star's cannery in Williams, which is the 
biggest in the world. It's a complicated affair because the contracts are 
usually signed in the spring, but the size of the summer harvest is always 
subject to weather.

A dirty field manager, farmers say, will guarantee you—for a price—a good 
spot in the harvest schedule, so your tomatoes don't rot on the vine. Or, say 
you're a farmer and you've contracted to sell one of the companies 50,000 
tons of tomatoes, but ended up producing 55,000 tons because of good weather. 
It's September and you have 5,000 tons of tomatoes sitting ripe in your 
fields. The field manager will do you a favor: He'll buy your tomatoes for 50 
cents on the dollar. What choice do you have? And then maybe he'll put your 
tomatoes through a dummy contract set up with another farmer, who'll sell 
them at full price to the cannery and split the returns with his friend the 
field manager. "There's been every kind of scam you can imagine in this 
business," says Don Cameron, who manages a large farm near Huron.

*****

As far as the consumer is concerned, the Salyer case is of little 
significance. Moldy tomatoes don't pose a health risk if they've been cooked 
and recooked by food processors. And the added price for paste that his 
buyers paid in return for bribes probably had a negligible effect on consumer 
prices. It hasn't affected the business much, either. Olam, a Singaporean 
concern, bought out SK's canneries and has taken up the slack.

Tomato industry folk in California are ready for the whole saga to 
end."Everyone is so darn happy he's getting his just rewards," said Gwen 
Young, a tomato executive with Kagome, a Japanese food-processing giant. "We 
can't have anyone playing underhand. It makes it sound like the rest of us 
do, and we don't." One bad tomato, she says, doesn't spoil the whole 
3,000-pound aseptically sealed box.*