SAT Essay Prompts
Prompt 1
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
Mass-produced tomatoes have become redder, more tender and slightly more flavorful than the crunchy orange cello-wrapped specimens of a couple of decades ago, but the lives of the workers who grow and pick them havent improved much since Edward R. Murrows revealing and deservedly famous Harvest of Shame report of 1960, which contained the infamous quote, We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.
Assignment: Should the cost of any product be measured and priced economically as it is now or it should also incorporate the extra embedded cost of humanity?
Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Attached below is the original exerpt from an online essay adopted for this essay.
Mass-produced tomatoes have become redder, more tender and slightly more flavorful than the crunchy orange cello-wrapped specimens of a couple of decades ago, but the lives of the workers who grow and pick them havent improved much since Edward R. Murrows revealing and deservedly famous Harvest of Shame report of 1960, which contained the infamous quote, We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.
But bit by bit things have improved some, a story thats told in detail and with insight and compassion by Barry Estabrook in his new book, Tomatoland. We can actually help them improve further.
A third of our tomatoes are grown in Florida, and much of that production is concentrated around Immokalee , a town that sits near the edge of the great river of grass, or the Everglades, the draining of which began in the late 19th century, thus setting the stage for industrial agriculture. Immokalee is a poor , immigrant working town, to the outsider at least a depressing community with few signs of hope.
The tomato fields of Immokalee are vast and surreal. An unplanted field looks like a lousy beach: the soil, which is white sand, contains little in the way of nutrients and wont hold any water. To grow tomatoes there requires mind-boggling amounts of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides . The tomatoes are, in effect, grown hydroponically, and the sand seems useful mostly as a medium for holding stakes in place.
Most of the big purchasers, like Wal-Mart and McDonalds, want firm, slicing tomatoes, because their destination is a burger or a sandwich, so the tomatoes are picked at what is called mature green, which isnt mature at all but bordering on it. Tomatoes with any color other than green are too ripe to ship, and left to rot; Ive posted a couple of pictures I took of those on my blog. The green tomatoes are gassed de-greened is the chosen euphemism to ripen them; the plants themselves are often killed with an herbicide to hasten their demise and get ready for the next crop.
The process, not to put too fine a point on it, is awful, but the demand is there Florida ships about a billion pounds of tomatoes a year and the main question has not been quality but fairness to the workers.
Unlike corn and soy, tomatoes harvest cannot be automated; it takes workers to pick that fruit. And not only have workers been enslaved, they have been routinely beaten, subject to sexual harassment, exposed to toxic chemicals and forced to wait for hours to find out whether they have work on a given day. Oh, and theyre underpaid.