Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, “The Price of Tomatoes,” investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point?
Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation’s top restaurants.
Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who’s who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents’ medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.
Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today’s agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.
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sobering, courageous, and a terrifyingly good read,
I will never look at a supermarket tomato the same way again. Never mind that I’ll never eat another one — ever — after reading this book. Author and food writer Barry Estabrook takes us on a journey to discover why those perfect-looking tomatoes piled up on supermarket shelves are so oddly tasteless, and believe me, the answer isn’t very appetizing. Flavor, though, is the least of his concerns. The big story here is the human suffering — right under our noses — that we unknowingly perpetuate each time we pick a tomato up and put it in our shopping cart. It took courage to sniff this story out. Estabrook is clearly a pro in his field and deserves a great deal of credit. The writing is engrossing and at times hilarious, all of which makes the heartbreak a little easier to stomach.
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|Posted on April 4th, 2012 at 9:51 am
I’ve Become a Tomato Activist,
When is the last time you ate a tomato? What did it taste like? Where did it come from?
If the answers to those questions are a.) within the past few months, b.) it had no taste at all, and c.) it came from the store or a restaurant, chances are you ate a modern-day relative of a real tomato.
“Perhaps our taste buds are trying o send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It comtains fourteen times as much sodium.” – from Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabroak.
That quote came from a new book that has caught my attention in a big way. I’ve noticed for quite some time that supermarket tomatoes have zero taste. But I like tomatoes in salad and other favorite dishes. I know they aren’t like “real” tomatoes from the garden or the farmers market, but I still buy them.
Not any more. Tomatoland made me take a good look at the tomato industry and I didn’t like what I saw at all. The author, Barry Estabrook decided to find out why we can’t buy a decent fresh tomato and discovered that it’s not a simple question and answer.
He learned that Florida “accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the U.S., and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes..” It’s an example of industrial agriculture at it’s worst.
In addition to growing a taste-less fruit, many Florida tomato growers are responsible for some very shameful practices: modern-day slavery and inhumane treatment of the tomato workers. There are shady legal and political practices as well. Numerous herbicides and pesticides are sprayed on the tomato fields, often right on the workers.
Besides learning how awful these growers are, Tomatoland taught me a lot about plant biology and the genetic and political history of our beloved plant. For instance, I had no idea tomatoes originally came from Peru and were the size of peas. The book is filled with the stories of the people surrounding the subject of tomatoes. Barry Estabrook brought them all to life.
There is no doubt about it – this is good reading. It’s part expose, part history, and all very good journalism. I dare you to read this book and not want to DO something. That’s what happened to me.
I’m now calling myself a Tomato Activist. What does that mean? For me, here’s how I’m defining it:
For one thing, I’ll never again buy or eat a fresh tomato unless I know exactly where it came from and under what conditions it was grown.
I will ask at restaurants where their tomatoes came from. If I’m not satisfied, I’ll ask to have the tomato removed and I’ll let them know why.
I have letters drafted to my senators and congressmen asking them to stick their noses into the working conditions for Florida tomato growers.
I’ll can/preserve enough tomatoes to keep us supplied with tomatoes until the next season.
I’m telling everyone I know to read Tomatoland.
I hope you’ll join me and become your own Tomato Activist.
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|Posted on April 4th, 2012 at 10:35 am
Informative and well-written,
With every passing year, I’m getting pickier and pickier about which tomatoes I eat. The more I think about it, the mealier and more tasteless the tomatoes that you buy in the supermarket are. I’d almost stopped buying them altogether before I read Tomatoland. Tomatoland convinced me even more that the tomatoes from the grocery store, especially the ones available in the winter, are just not worth it.
Taste is the obvious reason. Every single one of us can go to the supermarket and tell the difference between a tomato grown locally and in the summer versus one grown in Florida in the winter. Estabrook makes clear that that is because the organization that regulates the tomatoes that come out of Florida regulate for every single aspect of a tomato – color, shape, texture, blemishes – except taste.
The second problem with tomatoes grown in the winter is that, if they are not grown in a hot house, they are grown in Florida or California. The problem with growing tomatoes in Florida is that it just happens to be one of the worst places in the world to grow tomatoes. In order to do so successfully, Florida tomato growers rely heavily on dangerous pesticides and chemicals to fight off pests and diseases and to put nutrition in the soil, which is actually just sand.
And now we get to the heart of Tomatoland, the mistreatment of migrant workers, especially concerning pesticide use, on tomato farms. This was not necessarily the turn that I expected Tomatoland to take, but I was so happy that it did. This is an important cause and an important topic that everyone needs to know about. When you purchase a tomato, you are making a choice. Are you going to support the abuse and slavery of the people who pick those tomatoes? Some of the things that Estabrook talks about will horrify you, from babies being born with deformities because of their parents’ exposure to pesticides to examples of modern day slavery.
Estabrook does a good job balancing the political with the scientific. He interviews people on both sides of the debate and shows big agriculture in a fair light in my opinion. Not a good one, but a fair one. He shows what they have done horribly wrong and what they are doing, however reluctantly, to improve it. Things are getting better in the tomato industry, but it is all because of groups of people who were well-informed and willing to take a stand. The only shortcoming of this book is that I wish Estabrook had ended with a clearer sense of what still needs to be done. I would have rather had a final chapter that projected the future for tomatoes and the industry, as well as the future for migrant workers in the US.
I truly didn’t expect to be as enthralled with Tomatoland as I was, but I found it to be an engaging and well-written piece of non-fiction that has the power to change the way people view their tomatoes. Hopefully it will convince people that the best place to get tomatoes is their own back yard.
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|Posted on April 4th, 2012 at 10:38 am
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