Sadly, that's rarely the case in some other places like the States and Britain. But even here in Spain, the supermarkets and grocery store stock an increasingly bland selection of year-round tomatoes born of the plastic green-houses that lurk along the coast of Almeria. To get a good, locally grown one, you pay through the nose.
Part of the problem with tomatoes stems from the fact that we increasingly shop for convenience and that means monster production. The greenhouses of Almeria can be seen from space, but the money we save in consuming these hard, flavourless, force-ripened tomatoes are paid for in spades by those who farm them.
As a frequent visitor to Andalucia, I have been shocked and saddened by the sight of seas of plastic, shimmering across the baked Almerian landscape—already practically a desert—and up into the Alpujarra. More disturbing is the plight of the workers.
Immigrants coming over on small fishing boats from North Africa to work in Almeria's second sea, suffer the most appalling conditions while working for far below the minimum wage. They live in squalor, often without running water, proper toilets or electricity. As if that wasn't bad enough, rumours abound of serious health issues such as horrendous skin diseases, miscarriages, breast and testicular cancers probably caused by working for prolonged periods beneath the toxic plastic.
The official line is that the ethylene gas the plastic emits is benign. But you can't argue with the 40 kilos of pesticides and herbicides that are applied to every of hectare of greenhouse. Or, the fact that the greenhouses of southern Spain appear in the United Nation's Atlas of Environmental Change, which documents the effect on planet Earth of deforestation, climate change and urbanisation.
The mind boggles at the potentially harmful effects of actually eating this stuff, and while scientists at Granada University Hospital are making clear links between the greenhouses and the diseases, it could be too late for many by the time anything is proved. While the construction workers who build the greenhouses and the landowners get rich—Almeria exports some 2.5 million tons of greenhouse-grown vegetables a year—the price paid environmentally and in human terms must surely make buying local worth every penny.
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