I, Tomato: The Tragicomic Adventure of the Tomato from Field to Table |
Yes, you didn’t hear wrong. I am a tomato. When my price goes up, I become a “national issue” on television; when it goes down, I quietly end up in your salad. And every now and then this happens, you look at my label and sigh, then you talk as if you are not buying me but “the price of tomatoes.” Sometimes you do not see me as a food item but as a moral test. As if I were a red litmus paper that brings out the good and the bad inside people.
In fact, I am an ordinary agricultural product that reaches the shelves at the end of a long journey you do not see. I am ordinary; but my story is not ordinary. Because my story is the story of risk, cost, division of labor, profit, knowledge, and human psychology. And this story is rewritten every day: one day the rain is late, one day hail hits, one day diesel prices rise, one day demand suddenly jumps. While you stop by the market on your way home and ask, “How much are tomatoes today?”, I am already carrying ten different decisions, ten different risks, ten different expenses on my back.
From history to the present
First, a small history lesson. I was once branded as “poisonous.” In Europe, in my earliest days, instead of being put on the table, I became an ornamental plant in gardens. Some of my relatives really were toxic; but what determined which of us was harmful and which was edible was not a committee decision. People tried, failed, sorted, improved, and developed me. The bad ones were eliminated; the good ones were selected. Behind my becoming “edible” lay not command-and-control but trial and error, curiosity, and thousands of small observations from everyday life. Knowledge did not descend from a center; it came out of life.
The process that brings me to your table today works with the same logic: someone takes risk, someone bears cost, someone works, someone carries the shrink (the loss), someone builds coordination. And for this chain to run, everyone must survive. The name of survival is, most of the time, profit. Faces sour when profit is mentioned; but when there is no profit and the shelves become empty, those same faces sour even more. I call this “profit phobia, scarcity therapy.” Sometimes a person’s medicine is thought; but people who do not like thinking choose scarcity as a kind of teacher.
When I was on my branch, I was romantic. The moment I was picked, I began to become economic.
Seeds are bought. Fertilizer is bought. Pesticide is bought. Water and electricity are spent for irrigation. The tractor runs; diesel burns. Workers arrive; they carry crates, hoe, and harvest. When the farmer makes an investment decision, he also signs a contract with the sky: a contract that begins with, “In case frost hits, hail falls, disease spreads, floodwater comes…” The signature under that contract is renewed every year. Because agricultural life is not only labor; it is a contract signed with uncertainty.
But the real issue is the gap between where I am produced and where I am consumed. The producer in the field does not always have direct access to the city. Not every farmer has a cold-storage facility, a truck fleet, a wholesale-market entry card, or contracts with big supermarket chains. In most cases—especially at harvest time—there is a need for cash: paying workers, fertilizer debt, diesel debt… So every farmer wants to turn the crop into money quickly. This is exactly where the actor you call the intermediary appears. You think, “If there were no intermediary everything would be cheaper,” but the intermediary is sometimes not only an “intermediary”; at the same time, he is a financier, a logistician, a warehouse operator, and a risk taker.
Let’s say I was sold in the field for 6 lira. The first collector who buys me (in some places called a commission agent, in some places a trader, in some places a wholesaler) takes me. This person brings crates to remove me from the field, organizes workers, arranges a truck. Sometimes he goes around several fields in a single day; sometimes he makes me wait until he has gathered enough quantity within one or two days. Even this waiting is costly: the sun hits, humidity changes, the risk of cracking increases. And let me tell you the truth: waiting in the field is not romantic. I like waiting on my branch; waiting in a crate feels like punishment.
Then comes the small warehouse. In the small warehouse, sorting is done. Those that look “nice,” like me, are separated; those that look “a bit tired” are left behind. Because you only see the “nice” one on the shelf, you do not see the cost of sorting. Yet sorting is essentially a quality-control activity. Quality control means labor. Labor means cost.
A portion of the sorted product shrinks (loss). Shrink is sometimes natural decay, sometimes crushing, sometimes selectiveness. The moment you say, “I want a flawless tomato,” you increase the shrink rate. When the shrink rate increases, the cost of the tomatoes that survive rises. This sentence may sound bitter, but it is true: the demand for flawlessness produces cost.
After the small warehouse I pass to a bigger warehouse. In this bigger warehouse, more product accumulates. It accumulates because transport, especially intercity transport, needs scale. It is expensive to set off with a half-loaded truck. The accumulated product is, on the one hand, seen as “stock,” but on the other hand it is “transport efficiency.” So the aim of waiting is often not “to sell at a high price” but “to transport at a reasonable cost.” Of course, some foresee prices will rise and wait. You get angry at that too. But you often forget the risk of that waiting: if prices do not rise, they lose. If the product spoils, they lose. Waiting is not a free game.
Then the truck journey begins. I am filled into crates. Stacked. Back to back. I was the one being crushed in the bottom crate. My cousins on top were aristocrats; I was a lower-class tomato. Life on the bottom layer of a crate is harsh: weight above you, rot next to you, a road ahead, and behind you an official shouting, “Hurry up!”
The truck shakes for 600 kilometers. The road is not only distance; the road is cost. Diesel burned. The driver’s labor, insurance, rest time, maintenance, tires, depreciation… highway tolls, bridge fees… All of these are the lines written onto me before you tell the cashier, “What is this!” Moreover, the truck also has an opportunity cost: while the truck is doing this job, it cannot do another job. You assume “this transport job will happen anyway,” but a truck’s days are limited, a driver’s hours are........