Harvesting Tomatoes with Tony

This is one of my favorite webisodes of all time. Tony Gemignani took us on a field trip to Stanislaus County, to the town of Westley (near Modesto, CA), where we met Steve Rouse, the marketing director for the world famous Stanislaus Food Products company. We arrived just a week or so before the peak of the harvest, but found a few vines that were, nevertheless ripe and ready, as you will see. But more importantly, as you watch us in the field, the wind blowing, surrounded by acres and acres of low lying tomato vines, the smell of those tomatoes infusing the atmosphere with that distinctive tomato vine aroma (well, you had to be there for that part), there were a few indelible moments that I will never forget. First, for Tony, who we’ve been featuring for the past few months in this webisode series and whose talent is prodigious, this was not just a source for his tomato products but a place where, as he explains, he feels a deep connection to his own heritage, especially to his grandfather, a hardworking farmer and his personal hero, and this sense of connectedness clearly infuses and informs his own work. For Steve, as you will hear, there is a connection to his company’s own quest for quality, embodied in the values of the owner, Dino Cortopassi, to keep reaching for perfection. One of Dino’s sayings, and Steve shares it with us in this segment and I’m sure I’ll be stealing it many times in the future, is: “In the race for quality, there is no finish line.”

Even if you can’t smell the tomatoes the way we did that day, take it all in through these images and words. There are a lot of life lessons in this segment, transmitted through many generations of hard earned wisdom.