The people who pick our tomatoes

At five in the morning the fields outside Foggia are cold and silent. By ten, the crates are too hot to touch. In between, a crew of twenty-two people will pick about eighteen tonnes of plum tomatoes, most of which will be in a tin by evening.

Every August, ten thousand seasonal workers arrive in this flat corner of Puglia. Many come from West Africa, some from Romania and Bulgaria, a few from the next village. They are paid by the crate.

After the picking

What interested me most was the evening. When the last crate is loaded, the crew I followed eats together under a carob tree at the edge of the field: pasta with the day’s split tomatoes, bread, onions, a lot of olive oil and, on Fridays, grilled mackerel.

It is the only meal of the day that nobody hurries.