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    Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
    Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
    Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
    Audiobook7 hours

    Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

    Written by Barry Estabrook

    Narrated by Pete Larkin

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    ISBN9781452674506

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    Reviews for Tomatoland

    4/5

    100 ratings9 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I do have an unhealthy passion for tomatoes. I'm not sure when, where or how it started. I can recall a summer in college, growing tomatoes by the side of the house - standing in the cherry tomato patch eating warm sweet flavorful handfuls of tomatoes. I believe I ended up getting chapped lips that summer from eating way too many tomato sandwiches too.Gardening is really only fun to me because of the tomatoes - I do love growing the endless varieties of peppers and having an abundance of squash - but tomatoes were always it for me. And those who know me know I LOVE the German Johnson tomato - I think it's the perfect tomato. It might not be perfect for salads, it might not be perfect for salsa, it might not be perfect for grilled burgers - but it's perfect for me.This book got four point five out of five stars because German Johnson's were not mentioned once.In all seriousness, this is a must read if you are conscious about what your purchases support. You vote every time you purchase something and the only way to seriously have a clear mind about your lifestyle is to be comfortable in the knowledge (or ignorance) of what you are supporting every time you spend your money.
    • 5/5
      ?An acre of Florida tomatoes gets hit with five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as an acre of California tomatoes.?The factory farming of tomatoes in Florida is quite a horror story. Fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides, low wages, servitude, birth defects. It?s all there in what is truly a race to the bottom. Agribusiness has really screwed up the tomato.I never realized that the lack of taste in those off-season tomatoes from Florida was more or less deliberate. It?s not how the tomatoes taste that?s important, it?s about how they look on the grocery shelf after transport and so taste is no longer factored into the tomato gene pool. In fact, good tasting tomatoes that might be misshapen or bruised or in other ways not esthetically pleasing are not even shipped. Yield, size and appearance are all that matters. And people just keep buying them. There?s a lot of pain and suffering involved in getting a terrible tasting product on the grocery store shelves. I rarely buy winter tomatoes but that will now be never. I don?t want them on my restaurant salads, either.The book ends on an optimistic note, though. Labor attorneys and farm worker advocates have helped to make some of the workers lives more livable. Smaller niche farmers on the east coast are able support their farms by supplying high-end restaurants and farmers markets with quality tomatoes.This was an engaging, eye-opening read and good for anyone with an interest in learning where their food comes from.
    • 4/5
      Who knew that tomatoes were so FASCINATING? Man. I'm so glad that I decided to give this book a shot. As a first time heirloom tomato grower, I feel like this book was just made for me to read right now. So much information on everything from tomato harvesting practices (and the shady hiring practices that go along with them on big farms), tomato genetics, and even stories from small farms. I loved this.
    • 4/5
      If I had known this was mostly about farm workers and industrial growing practices I probably wouldn't have picked it up, but I am glad that I did.
    • 5/5
      I do have an unhealthy passion for tomatoes. I'm not sure when, where or how it started. I can recall a summer in college, growing tomatoes by the side of the house - standing in the cherry tomato patch eating warm sweet flavorful handfuls of tomatoes. I believe I ended up getting chapped lips that summer from eating way too many tomato sandwiches too.Gardening is really only fun to me because of the tomatoes - I do love growing the endless varieties of peppers and having an abundance of squash - but tomatoes were always it for me. And those who know me know I LOVE the German Johnson tomato - I think it's the perfect tomato. It might not be perfect for salads, it might not be perfect for salsa, it might not be perfect for grilled burgers - but it's perfect for me.This book got four point five out of five stars because German Johnson's were not mentioned once.In all seriousness, this is a must read if you are conscious about what your purchases support. You vote every time you purchase something and the only way to seriously have a clear mind about your lifestyle is to be comfortable in the knowledge (or ignorance) of what you are supporting every time you spend your money.
    • 5/5
      According to Tomatoland, when it comes to modern-day slavery in America, the supermarket Florida tomato is the new Georgia cotton. Superior taste aside, Estabrook details many other little/unknown reasons you should grow your own lumpy heirlooms instead of opting for the perfect-looking red globes at the grocery store chains and refuse to order them in restaurants all winter long. Very interesting and exceptionally horrifying, especially the chapters detailing unreported birth defect disease clusters resulting from repeated agrichemical exposure. Socially and economically relevant--highly recommended for anyone involved in horticulture, food science, agribusiness, social work, occupational safety, or environmental and labor law.
    • 3/5
      Tomatoland is a fairly thorough examination of tomato farming in Florida. Barry covers how it is that the tomato industry has generated fairly tasteless tomatoes, the plight of the migrant farmer, the problems with insectisides, the control of the tomato industry over the shape and color of tomatoes, and recent improvements in tomato farming. I found the information provided interesting. I will likely try to find tomatoes from local growers. I mildly recommend the book. What was told could have been more efficiently presented.
    • 4/5
      This book is like The Jungle for tomatoes. Remember that time you saw the documentary/read the book/heard from your socially conscious mother about the plight of factory farm chickens? This book will make you think of tomatoes in the same way. Before reading it, I was content in the belief that farmworkers in post-Chavez America are not sprayed with pesticides in the fields or imprisoned in storage sheds and used as slaves. Now I know that just a few short years ago, farm working mothers were having babies with no limbs and undocumented immigrants were being beaten for running away from farms. The take-away from all this? Not only are those out-of-season beefsteak wannabes from Florida flavorless and pulpy, they’re grown under inhumane conditions. Up with farmer’s markets and ugly heirlooms! The downside of this book is that the chapters are not consistent in their approach to the topic – some describe human rights abuses, some history, some personalities related to the tomato farming industry. It made the read a bit choppy, although still interesting.
    • 5/5
      “An acre of Florida tomatoes gets hit with five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as an acre of California tomatoes.”The factory farming of tomatoes in Florida is quite a horror story. Fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides, low wages, servitude, birth defects. It’s all there in what is truly a race to the bottom. Agribusiness has really screwed up the tomato.I never realized that the lack of taste in those off-season tomatoes from Florida was more or less deliberate. It’s not how the tomatoes taste that’s important, it’s about how they look on the grocery shelf after transport and so taste is no longer factored into the tomato gene pool. In fact, good tasting tomatoes that might be misshapen or bruised or in other ways not esthetically pleasing are not even shipped. Yield, size and appearance are all that matters. And people just keep buying them. There’s a lot of pain and suffering involved in getting a terrible tasting product on the grocery store shelves. I rarely buy winter tomatoes but that will now be never. I don’t want them on my restaurant salads, either.The book ends on an optimistic note, though. Labor attorneys and farm worker advocates have helped to make some of the workers lives more livable. Smaller niche farmers on the east coast are able support their farms by supplying high-end restaurants and farmers markets with quality tomatoes.This was an engaging, eye-opening read and good for anyone with an interest in learning where their food comes from.