Toxic fruits: tomatoes, migration, and the new Italian slavery

Abstract

In Italy, tomatoes exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics. They occupy such an important place in the Italian imaginary, and in the world's imaginary of Italy, that their cultural and culinary stature obscures the deplorable conditions of their production, and silences the voices of those whose labour delivers them to the global table. In this article, we examine the tomato harvest in three contemporary works that confront the conditions of agricultural migrant labour in Puglia and Lazio: Leogrande's (2016) book Uomini e caporali, the noir novel Bloody Mary by Vichi and Gori (2008), and Mariani's (2017) docu-musical film The Harvest. Through an environmental humanistic approach we unravel persistent tropes in these different forms of representation: toxicity and toxic masculinity; socio-cultural isolation; narrative and biological hybridity. These themes foreground the human costs of the harvest, but they also expose the challenges and limitations of representing it. We argue that, although the work they do is of vital importance, by dedicating little attention to tomatoes themselves and sidelining the tomato's cultural destination on the Italian table, these accounts risk reinforcing the divide between comfortable meals and the punishing labor of the harvest. RIASSUNTO I pomodori italiani esistono all'incrocio tra orgoglio culinario nazional-culturale, petropolitica mediterranea, norme agro-ambientali, e politica di genere. Occupano un posto talmente importante nell'immaginario italiano che la loro statura culturale offusca le condizioni della loro produzione e mette a tacere la voce di chi lavora per servirli alla tavola globale. Questo articolo esamina la raccolta di pomodori in tre opere che trattano il lavoro agricolo migrante in Puglia e in Lazio: Uomini e caporali di Leogrande (2016), il noir Bloody Mary di Vichi e Gori (2008), e The Harvest, film docu-musicale di Mariani (2017). Adottando un approccio umanistico-ambientale identifichiamo una serie di topoi ricorrenti, quali tossicità e mascolinità tossica, isolamento socioculturale, ibridità narrativa e biologica. Anche se queste opere mettono in risalto i costi umani della raccolta, trascurano i costi ecologici dell'agricoltura industriale e la destinazione culturale del pomodoro nella cucina italiana. In questa maniera rischiano di rafforzare il divario tra gli agi dei nostri pasti e il lavoro duro della raccolta.

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