Based on a James Beard award-winning article from a leading voice on
the politics of agribusiness, Tomatoland combines history, legend,
passion for taste, and investigative reporting on modern agribusiness
and environmental issues into a revealing, controversial look at the
tomato, the fruit we love so much that we eat $4 billion-worth
annually.
2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category
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 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.
