Like selling spoiled milk
The entire Northeast tomato crop is at fungal risk from the combination of too little sun during our rainy cool spring/summer and the voracious networked greed of big box stores. Talk about global vs. local, simulations vs. actualities!
Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April.
via Late Blight Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic – NYTimes.com.
In late June Thomas Zitter who like William Fry is also a Professor from the Department of Plant Pathology, Cornell University, posted the following on Cornell’s Vegetable MD Online site:
The second reason, and more tragic for the Northeast, is that infected plants were distributed to large local retail stores throughout the region (Ohio to Maine). Never before has such an extensive distribution of infected plants occurred. The inoculum is exceptionally contagious, spreading on garden center shelves to tomato plants not involved in the original and initial source of the inoculum.
via Vegetable Diseases Cornell.
You wouldn’t think juicy, farmer’s market tomatoes would end up as another front in the fight of local communities against globalized network effects. Fighting for a what some may think of as a luxurious indulgence is not quite the death battle of human versus networked machine from The Terminator franchise. But as someone who spends lots of time in August and September putting tomatoes away and making sauce, paste and ketchup from our local CSA, this is really, really scary.
Eating local and avoiding calorie delivery systems sold as “food” is not just some romantic fantasy. You have to rely on nature, your skills, and the skills of local farmers to feed your family. But the deck is stacked, and the threat to the tomato harvest is not fair. Also from the Times article, “John Mishanec, a pest management specialist at Cornell who has been visiting farms and organizing emergency growers’ meetings across upstate New York”:
Mr. Mishanec said agricultural pathogens can easily spread when plants are distributed regionally and sold by big-box retailers.
“Farms are inspected, greenhouses are inspected,” he said, “but garden centers aren’t, and the people who work there aren’t trained to spot disease.”
via Late Blight Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic – NYTimes.com
The safety of our food system should be changed to include the big box stores. Local communities should at least have a level playing field in the fight against simulated “food.” To those who want to rely on the local, selling infected tomato plants down at the garden center is like a diary selling spoiled milk.
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Thanks for posting this. I get all my tomato plants in the spring at the local farmer’s market. This is yet another reason to support local farmers and agriculture and to avoid places where getting everything in one place is the answer. When you sell everything, there is no way to ensure the quality, or the blight free-ness, of everything in the store.
Interesting and well put. As a “left coaster” I had no idea this problem was going on in the East.
Thanks Nick and Rick … I’m glad you both stopped by my new blog here. Much appreciated … I’m looking forward to lots of informative, interesting conversations on True/Slant.
And Nick, I wish we could say your locally-sourced tomato plants were safe, and they may be. But if you neighbor, or their neighbor’s neighbor, went over to the garden center at the local Lowe’s or Home Depot and bought plants infected with fungal spores, well, they’ll end up on yours too. That’s the real outrage in this — big box stores not only harm those who shop there, they harm all of us.
Veritas Farms is one of the farms I went to on Saturday (they’re up in New Paltz). So far they’ve escaped. But they closed their u-pick and Stephanie and Paul who own the place will no longer let visitors (i.e., those who come to the farm to buy their produce, eggs, and meat) walk around. Other farms in the area, careful organic farmers all, have already had to pull their tomatoes and potatoes. People will really be hurting from this.
If I was prone to conspiracy theories–which I thankfully I am not–I’d be imaging some vast corporate plot to destroy local agriculture.
[...] tomatoes, and for years farmers in the northeast have been happy to oblige our taste. But as I wrote a few weeks ago this year’s tomato harvest was at risk. Late blight, a plant disease that usually appears [...]