Written 11/2018
Howard Yasgar
I was told this short story back in the 1990,s by a good friend Richard Schneider.
Richard was an entrepreneur who was involved in various businesses. He always had his eyes open for the possibility of a new venture.
One day, Richard was driving South on U.S. 1, he was heading for a meeting in Homestead Florida.
At the time Homestead and the surrounding area was the tomato capital of Florida, possibly the world. Hundreds of acres of farm land was devoted only to growing tomatoes.
Today, NAFTA has changed all that, the tomatoes now come from Mexico and all the acreage in south Florida that was devoted to growing tomatoes, now have private homes and condo’s built on them.
Anyway, as Richard was driving South on U.S. 1, as he was passing through Homestead there was a terrible smell, it smelled like a garbage dump.
Now, every day, when Richard drove down U.S. 1 there was always the awful garbage smell.
He noticed that the smell was strongest as he passed by all the vegetable packing houses.
Back then there were all kinds of packing houses in homestead, packing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that were grown in South Florida.
One day Richard decided to drive behind the packing houses, and find our where the smell was coming from.
It took a bit of maneuvering to get behind the packing houses, but when he did he couldn’t believe what he saw.
There was a absolute mountain of tomatoes, with a Caterpillar bulldozer driving over the pile and crushing them all, that was the garbage smell, it was tons of rotting tomatoes.
Richard got out of the car and walked over to the mountain of tomatoes and picked a couple of them up.
The tomatoes were perfect except they were deformed, one was a double tomato, like two tomatoes grown together, another one looked like some ones behind. He picked up another one and it looked like a pair of boobs.
The packing house foreman saw Richard looking and came over to him.
I think at first he thought Richard was some kind of inspector, or possibly the police, as I’m sure it was illegal to just crush tons of tomatoes, like they were doing.
Richard asked the foreman why they were crushing thousands of perfectly good tomatoes?
The foreman said they were the ugly rejects, he sais the buyers of tomatoes only wanted perfectly
round ones, and all the deformed ones were all thrown away.
The first thought Richard had was, there are millions of starving people all over the world that would be happy to eat an ugly looking tomato.
Every day Richard thought about it, why not just crush the tomatoes and make tomato sauce out of them, or tomato juice or something, Richard felt that anything would be better than throwing them away into the garbage.
Richard had heard that the actor Paul Newman had just come out with all kinds of tomato based
Spaghetti sauces.
Richard felt that he was sure he could get all the deformed tomatoes he wanted for free perhaps he should Call them, he had heard that Paul Newman’s company said they want to help feed needy people.
What could be better, he could sell the tomatoes to Newman’s company for next to nothing, they could just pay the freight and a small commission for Richard to arrange it.
So Richard called Paul Newman’s company and to his dismay, they weren’t even slightly interested.
It appeared they all knew about ugly tomatoes.
The tomato growers and packers have tons of deformed tomatoes and no market to sell them, and they must to pay to take them to the dump.
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