Tomatoland
How Industrial Farming ‘Destroyed’ The Tasty Tomato
“Tomatoland” is at its most potent and scathing in its portrayal of South Florida’s tomato growers and their tactics over the past half-century. It’s infuriating to read of their lack of regard for the taste of their product. Historically, when a farmer has learned to grow a tasty variety, that farmer has actually been scorned and prevented from shipping it
New York Times
“If you worry, as I do, about the sad and sorry state of the tomato today and want to know what a tomato used to be like and what it could hopefully become again, read Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland. A fascinating history of the peregrination of the tomato throughout the centuries.”
Jacques Pepin, author of Essential Pepin
If you bite into a tomato between the months of October and June, chances are that tomato came from Florida. The Sunshine State accounts for one-third of all fresh tomatoes produced in the United States — and virtually all of the tomatoes raised during the fall and winter seasons.
But the tomatoes grown in Florida differ dramatically from the red garden varieties you might grow in your backyard. They’re bred to be perfectly formed — so that they can make their way across the U.S. and onto your dinner table without cracking or breaking.
“For the last 50 or more years, tomato breeders have concentrated essentially on one thing and that is yield — they want plants that yield as many or as much as possible,” writer Barry Estabrook tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “They also want those fruits to be able to stand up to being harvested, packed, artificially turned orange [with ethylene gas] and then shipped away and still be holding together in the supermarket a week or 10 days later. Read more
What the publisher says:
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 100 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 produces fruits with a fraction of the calcium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C, and fourteen tiimes as much sodium as 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 United States attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; 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 and 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.
Reviews:
The New York Times – That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity
Civil Eats – Why the Modern Tomato is Flawed: A Review of Tomatoland
Patrick T Reardon – Book review: “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit” by Barry Estabrook
The Denver Post – Book review: “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit”
“Estabrook tells two powerful stories here. The first is about the appalling ways in which Big Pig raises animals, pollutes the environment, and uses the political system to avoid and fight regulation. The second is about how skilled animal husbandry and respect for the intelligence of pigs produces calmer animals, more delicious meat, and a far more satisfying life for farmers and pigs alike. Pig Tales is beautifully written. It is also deeply touching.”
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and author of Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics
“Before Tomatoland, I thought I knew about the American way of farming. Barry Estabrook proved that I was wrong, painting a devastating portrait of what was really taking place out in the fields. It changed the way I cook and eat. Pig Tales is even more illuminating, a window into the world of pigs and pig farmers that every American omnivore needs to read. You will never look at a piece of pork in quite the same way.”
Ruth Reichl author of Delicious!
Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Guide to Sustainable Meat
In 2015 W. W. Norton published Barry’s book Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Guide to Sustainable Meat. After examining all things to do with hog farming, Barry concludes that pork is either the worst meat you can eat–or the very best. It all depends on how it is raised. He still eats bacon, but he’s very picky about what goes into his pan.
https://wwnorton.com/books/Pig-Tales/
In Pig Tales, New York Times best-selling author of Tomatoland Barry Estabrook turns his attention to the dark side of the American pork industry. Drawing on personal experiences raising pigs as well as sharp investigative instincts, Estabrook covers the range of the human-porcine experience. He shows how these intelligent creatures are all too often subjected to lives of suffering in confinement and squalor, sustained on a drug-laced diet just long enough to reach slaughter weight. But Estabrook also reveals how it is possible to raise pigs responsibly and respectfully, benefiting producers and consumers—as well as some of the top chefs in America.
Provocative, witty, and deeply informed, Pig Tales is bound to spark conversation at dinner tables across America.
Review: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/674446/pdf
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Bio: Barry Estabrook
Stints working on a dairy farm and a commercial fishing boat as a young man convinced Barry Estabrook that writing about how food was produced was a hell of a lot easier than actually producing it.
He lives on a 30-acre tract in Vermont where he gardens, tends a dozen laying hens, taps maple trees, and (in an effort to reduce his alcohol footprint) brews hard cider from his own apples that no one except him likes.
He was formerly a contributing editor at the late lamented Gourmet magazine. He has written for the the New York Times, the Washington Post, TheAtlantic.com, MarkBittman.com, Saveur, Men’s Health, Reader’s Digest, and pretty much anyone else who will take his stuff.
His article for Gourmet on labor abuses in Florida’s Tomato fields received the 2010 James Beard Award for magazine feature writing. Read it here. This blog also reveived the James Beard Award for best blog of the year.
Source: http://politicsoftheplate.com/?page_id=2
Articles
The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/barry-estabrook/
National Resource Defense Council (NRDC)
https://www.nrdc.org/authors/barry-estabrook
Civil Eats
https://civileats.com/author/bestabrook/
