Tomatoland, Barry Estabrook
Tomatoland, Barry Estabrook
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Tomatoland
How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

Author: Barry Estabrook

Narrator: Pete Larkin

Unabridged: 7 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/30/2011


Synopsis

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 $5 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 exposé of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

About Barry Estabrook

James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook was a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine for eight years, writing investigative articles about where food comes from. He was the founding editor of Eating Well magazine and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Reader's Digest, Men's Health, Audubon, and the Washington Post, and contributes regularly to the Atlantic Monthly's website. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Food Writing series, and he has been interviewed on numerous television and radio shows. Barry lives and grows tomatoes in his garden in Vermont.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David on July 03, 2012

This book is sort of a cross between The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and The Grapes of Wrath. It is both a description of the tomato and how agri-business has transformed the tomato into a tasteless commodity, and a sociological muckraking of the obscene conditions suffered b......more

Goodreads review by Simone on September 06, 2011

Everyone. Go. Read. This. Book. Now, before you eat another bad tomato. "Any American who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave. That's not an assumption', said Douglas Molloy, a U.S. attorney in F......more

Goodreads review by Marvin on November 15, 2011

If you only read one book about tomatoes in your lifetime make it this one. Thanks to investigative books and films like Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc., we have been exposed to the shady going-ons in the food industry that gives us unhealthy sub-standard food products and inhumane treatment of anima......more

Goodreads review by Adwoa on November 27, 2011

Estabrook's Tomatoland offers an incredibly lucid and even-handed look at what is frequently a horrific industry in an unfair state - and for that, I commend him. As a writer and garden grower of tomatoes who cares about both good food and human rights, Immokalee presents a complex problem. On one ha......more