Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
by Barry Estabrook
Andrews McMeel, 2011. 220 pgs. Non-Fiction.

Everyone who has ever tasted a vine-ripened tomato from his own garden knows that supermarket tomatoes bear little resemblance to the real thing other than that they are round and red. Red, as we discover in Estabrook's invaluable book, because they have been blasted with ethylene gas to artificially ripen them after they have traveled in their bright green state long distances, each tomato so hard one could blow through your windshield if it fell off the truck at speed. What one may not know is that the Florida Tomato Committee (among others) decrees that this must be so, screening every single tomato that leaves that state for color, size, and shape, but never for taste. Because Florida tomatoes are grown in sand in hot and humid conditions, growers must rely on chemical nutrients and a toxic mix of pesticides to bring their fruit to market. And also, in the case of the pesticides, to bring their workers' babies to earth armless and legless. Virtual and actual enslavement have been the rule rather than the exception in Florida agribusiness' employment practices. But there is a bright side to Estabrook's text as well, as he shares the history of the tomato, which originated in the high mountain deserts of Peru and Chile, and also the stories of more principled growers who sell ugly tomatoes that taste like a tomato should taste, and who pay their workers a living wage and who have a care for their health and safety. Tomatoland is a fascinating, eye-opening look at what we eat and why, and how things should be different. Estabrook himself points out the irony inherent in an industry where the workers who bring our food to market cannot themselves afford to feed their families. Come on. This is America, for crying out loud.