The food critic Craig Claiborne once labeled them “tasteless, hideous and repulsive.” James Beard called them “an almost total gastronomic loss.” The New Yorker writer Thomas Whiteside found in 1977 that one survived a six-foot fall onto the floor intact, thus easily exceeding the federal standard for automobile bumpers.
The subject of their scorn? The Florida field tomato — which the Trump administration wants us to eat more of by imposing a 21 percent tariff on most Mexican tomatoes starting July 14.
The tariff represents a double insult to consumers, assaulting both our taste buds and our pocketbooks. President Trump has told us to make do with fewer (and more expensive) imported pencils and dolls for the greater good of bringing manufacturing back to America. Fine. But tomatoes? The last thing American consumers need is a revitalization of Florida’s withering tomato industry.
Even some industry leaders admit the mediocrity of Florida field-grown tomatoes. In 2020, when I visited Lipman Family Farms, one of the largest growers of field tomatoes in the United States, its chief executive at the time, Kent Shoemaker, warned me not to expect anything like the fully red vine-ripened tomatoes our grandparents grew. “We have to get the tomato from Immokalee, Fla., to St. Louis, Mo., in February, and your grandma’s tomato wouldn’t make it,” he explained, adding, “You have to make choices.”
Those choices include breeding tomatoes not for flavor, but to survive disease, insects, shipping and Florida weather from blistering heat to tropical downpours. Some Florida tomato varieties are bred to fit perfectly on a fast-food burger patty. Or, if they are destined for Subway, to look fresh in a display case hours after being sliced.
Because high sugar levels in tomatoes attract bacteria and fungi while also reducing size and yield, Florida growers have to deliberately minimize sweetness. Finally, to survive the journey to St. Louis or anywhere else, the fruits are picked while still bright green and rock hard; they turn pink by spending several days or more in a room filled with ethylene gas.
Not surprisingly, the resulting product is often compared to soggy cardboard and Styrofoam. How has a food this bad survived in the American market since the middle of the last century? Because from the first frost of fall to the arrival of summer there was almost no other option. Until, that is, 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (superseded by the Tomato Suspension Agreement) gradually eliminated the tariffs on Mexican tomatoes, whose growers have won over shoppers by developing smaller and specialty varieties, including cherry and cocktail tomatoes that actually have a modicum of flavor.
While the tariff will drive up the cost of both Mexican- and American-grown tomatoes, consumers won’t be the only losers. Arizona State University estimates that job losses among the warehouse operators, truckers and grocers who process and move tomatoes from the border throughout the United States could exceed 50,000 in Arizona and Texas alone. Some of this business would be transferred to Florida, but it’s likely that a significant shift in tomato production from Mexico to America would result in a net loss of well-paying American jobs.
The tariffs will, however, create demand for one particular class of worker: the H-2A seasonal visa holders, virtually all of whom come from Mexico and Central America, who pick, sort and pack American tomatoes. An increase in Florida tomato production will require an increase in the number of migrants from south of the border at a time when Mr. Trump is looking to reverse migration trends.
The fact is that Mexican soils, where tomatoes were first domesticated some 2,500 years ago, are far better suited to growing them than the Florida sand, which has to be fumigated to death before each planting to kill off pathogens that can ruin the crop. And the Trump administration seems to have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, one of the basic tenets of trade: Import what other countries grow or make best, export what you do best and both sides benefit. Mexico gets most of its wheat and nearly all of its soybeans from American farms while sending tomatoes and avocados north. In fact, Mexico is the leading export market for American agricultural goods, making the new tariff seem gratuitous, unless you happen to be a Florida tomato grower.
Growers’ concerns about their declining market share are understandable. About 30 years ago, U.S. farms supplied roughly 80 percent of America’s fresh tomatoes. Today, that number is just 30 percent, with the majority of tomatoes coming from Florida.
Yet in the long run, Mexican tomatoes may pose less of a threat to Florida tomato growers than the budding domestic and Canadian greenhouse industry, which is producing an ever-increasing number of tomatoes (as well as lettuce and berries) in enormous heated structures exceeding 100 acres. Grown hydroponically using a fraction of the water and pesticides of field tomatoes, tomatoes nurtured in greenhouses near major population centers can be picked vine-ripened and placed on supermarket shelves in days instead of weeks.
Given the capricious nature of Mr. Trump’s tariff announcements, Florida tomato growers might consider holding off on planting more acreage. And the rest of us might want to wait until midsummer to enjoy a local, vine-ripened tomato. You know, “your grandma’s tomato.”
William Alexander is the author of “Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World” and “The $64 Tomato.”
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