Tomato Travels

In my long-term project Tomato Travels, I follow the tomato from seed to tin across Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands—tracing industrial farming, patented seeds and migrant labour, linked to climate crisis, globalization, migration and poverty.

«It is hard to imagine a world without tomatoes.»*

Daniel Rihs

TOMATO TRAVELS

From seed to tin

A tomato flashes glossy-fresh between slices of mozzarella. It lays the groundwork for carefree pizza nights. And it’s what turns a Bolognese into the best pasta sauce in the world. In short: it may be just a side dish, but it’s the secret star on our plates.

No other vegetable is grown and traded more worldwide. Yet what we call a tomato today is the result of centuries of breeding. It is far more than a food item—it is a designed cultural product. Depending on the language, we call it the love apple, the golden apple, or the paradise apple. It stands for sun, the South, and healthy eating. But it is also a guide through a complex world: its production and supply chain leads us straight into the major issues of our time—climate crisis, globalization, migration, and poverty.

With my long-term project Tomato Travels, I set out on this journey. My photographs explore what an economic system really looks like when it treats the Earth as an inexhaustible supplier of standardized, patentable raw materials.

My expeditions have taken me into the highly industrialized vegetable production of Spain’s Extremadura region and repeatedly to Andalusia. But also to Hamburg, to the Dutch province of Limburg, to the Swiss cantons of Aargau and Thurgau—and to Lake Murten.

Yet nowhere do the ecological and social consequences of deregulated agriculture become as stark as in the Andalusian region of Almería. It is a mix of exploitation and innovation, efficiency and negligence, that makes it possible to produce fresh vegetables and fruit year-round. Here, greenhouses form a vast sea of plastic—visible even from space.

And in between: people

Agriculture on this scale is impossible without labor migration. The harvest workers—there are hardly any women—are not allowed to enter legally. Whether and how they manage to reach Spain is irrelevant to the functioning of the system. Poverty in the countries of origin and the hopeful prospect of a work permit in an EU state ensure a constant supply of labor. In 2024 alone, the Spanish organization Caminando Fronteras documented more than 10,450 deaths on the different sea routes to Spain.

Many migrants work illegally for the first years. Alongside hard labor comes the fear of accidents or illness—because if they are apprehended by authorities during this period, they may lose the chance to legalize their status in the future. Papers are often issued arbitrarily; the process is slow and exhausting. And even if it succeeds, it does not mean an escape from poverty. Wages remain around five euros an hour—just over half the legal Spanish minimum wage. A wage that is still nowhere near enough to live on in Almería.

Across the region, an estimated 10,000 labor migrants are homeless. They sleep in abandoned houses, garages, sheds—or directly inside the greenhouses. Entire makeshift settlements have emerged, where several hundred people live without running water or electricity.

On sealed ground

In the middle of this sea of greenhouses, small fortress-like islands rise up: the research and production centers of global agribusiness corporations. Genetic engineering remains strictly regulated in Europe; the gene structure cannot be altered. But the trade in patented seeds is a billion-euro business—meaning: resistant varieties are bred. First, researchers examine what matches genetically. Then plants are crossbred conventionally. Patented seeds often mean monocultures and a loss of biodiversity—and they make farmers dependent on agribusiness corporations.

Intensive agriculture has immense consequences for the region: drought no longer comes in cycles; it has become a permanent condition. Drinking water and irrigation are only possible thanks to industrial desalination of seawater. Riverbeds have carried no water for years; they are overgrown and full of trash.

The compacted, sealed soils are practically impermeable. They absorb nothing when it rains. People here are increasingly afraid of torrential downpours—of catastrophic floods, inundations, and deaths.

Elements in the food chain

On my travels, I have spoken with people who—despite everything—try to act responsibly: harvest workers, farmers, biologists, volunteer Spanish teachers, day laborers, drivers, warehouse workers, storekeepers. Most want to do their work well—and, within what is possible, contribute something positive.

As long as we are not willing or able to pay the true price for a kilo of fresh tomatoes in winter, it is pointless to simply point in outrage at Almería’s relentless system.

My photographs do not accuse. Instead, with Tomato Travels, I shed light on the structural violence of global food production. Between individual images, connections emerge—bringing what is hidden into view and telling a larger story. When we recognize people in the photographs, they are not close-ups. Often, it is bodies we see: not as individuals, but as elements in this food chain—one that pushes both humans and nature to their limits, from valuable patented seed to the cheap tin of peeled tomatoes.

The photographs are digitally made, but not manipulated. They were created without the use of artificial intelligence. Tomato Travels began in 2021 as part of a collaboration funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) with Prof. Dr. Crispin Thurlow at the University of Bern. A travel grant from the Canton of Bern made it possible for me to continue the photographic work.

(Quote: Clarissa Hyman, food journalist)