From USA Today:

Joe Procacci’s tomatoes may taste great, but the Florida Tomato Committee says they’re just too ugly.

“They are prohibiting trade,” Procacci says of the committee, a 12-member board of tomato growers that dictates the size, shape and skin quality required of Florida-grown tomatoes. “Last year, we had to dump $3 million worth of tomatoes, and we had customers … who were begging for them.”

Misshapen and scarred but having a unique flavor, the UglyRipes Procacci grows in South Florida near Naples initially caused his sales to triple. But Florida’s strict marketing rules require that the state’s tomatoes look almost perfect or they can’t be sold out of state during the winter. Procacci says that’s the time of year when demand for his UglyRipes is highest.

To allow misshapen and blemished tomatoes could open the way for a flood of ugly tomatoes to hit the market, says Reggie Brown, the tomato committee’s manager.

“If you allowed the producers of UglyRipe to ship any quality of tomato, then how could you justify not allowing any quality tomato into the market place?” he asks.

Procacci says he developed the UglyRipe because his customers complained that Florida tomatoes, which are picked green and gassed to spur ripening, tasted “like cardboard.”

“We developed something that people have been asking for for 50 years,” he says. “Everybody complains about the taste of tomatoes.”

What makes the dispute more problematic for the committee is the attention the controversy focuses on the tomato industry’s most glaring weakness — taste.

“Everybody has an emotional attachment with a tomato they’ve grown and the memory of that taste,” Brown says. “If you hold me to the standard of the tomato that you’re emotionally attached to, I’ll never meet that standard. You can’t beat a memory.”

So you might as well ban anyone who tries from the marketplace, eh, Reggie?

These marketing committees were never a good idea to begin with, and they’re about sixty years out of date. It’s time to do away with them.

The Institute for Justice just took a similar marketing committee to court — the Dairy Promotion Program, which forces all dairy farmers to contribute dairy promotion, most notably the “Got Milk?” campaigns.

Seems to me that the UglyRipes tomoto case is ripe for IJ’s plucking.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 10th, 2004 at 11:57 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.