Francesco Amorosino - Migrant Tomatoes
Once a year Italian families make tomato sauce at home, cooking and canning a huge amount of vegetables. Tonnes of tomatoes are grown Italy’s south and harvested by around 19,000 labourers who are paid 1 or 2 Euro per box. In 2015 alone 13 workers died in the fields as a result of high temperatures. Many of the crop pickers are immigrants. The tomatoes my family bought, still dirty with soil, showed the fingerprints of those who had harvested them. I imagined their stories, the hours spent in the sun, their hope and their desire to work. Since then, I haven’t looked at the sauce the same way.