Food: Sad Tomatoes

To perfect the tomato that makes the soup that Campbell sells by the millions of cans, botanists have been working for years on different strains of Lycopersicon esculentum. Last week the soup-tomato crop was ripening right on time, as the scientists intended, but for once its punctuality was a disaster. Just when the bumper crop was ready to be picked from California to New Jersey, the Campbell Soup Co. found itself saddled with a strike.

With thousands of workers off the job at company plants across the country, Maryland broilers destined for Campbell chicken-noodle soup were in danger of turning leathery. At its plant in Paris, Tex., the company's output of Franco-American spaghetti products was running at least 50% below normal. But tomatoes were far and away the biggest casualties. California tomatoes intended for Campbell cans withered on the vine. Ohio patches went unpicked, and migrant workers hungrily moved on. Around Campbell's tomato-red brick home plant in Camden, N.J., the rich blaze of overripe fruit faded as mold crawled across the humid fields.

Seed of Discord. Traditionally, the company bargains separately at each of its 20 plants. But the unions this time insisted on a common expiration date for all Campbell contracts. Behind the demand is the burgeoning drive by A.F.L.C.I.O. Organizer Stephen Harris, to duplicate company-wide contracts that he won from the Union Carbide Corp. and the copper industry. His "traveling committee," representing the firm's unions, made its overriding aim to negotiate contracts for all Campbell plants at the same time. Meat Cutters Union Local President Clarence Clark claims that the old system enables the company to "play one union against another." By contrast, management views the current strike as a harbinger of a united labor force that would be able, as Campbell Vice President William E. Harwick puts it, "to turn us on and off" on a company-wide basis.

By last week 30% of Campbell's New Jersey tomatoes had spoiled in the field, and many were being plowed under. The company estimated that the ruin could reach 80% within the next two weeks. Campbell's 250 contract farmers in southern New Jersey, a group of whom has sued two unions for damage because of the strike, grow nearly 40% of the area's 21,000-acre crop. In California, where rotting tomatoes could result in a loss of well over $4,000,000 if the strike persists, farmers called on President Johnson to invoke the Taft-Hartley law to stop the shutdown. The biggest losers of all are the migrant workers. Thousands of them were stranded without pay in what is normally their most profitable season.