Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

248 Pages·2011·80.75 MB·English

by  Barry Estabrook

upermarker produce ection bulging with a year-round
supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange: tomaroe have
become: all bur a national birthright. Bur in Tomato/and, which
is bas d on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of
Tomatoes," inve rigarivc: food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals
the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh
tomato industry. Fields are prayed with more than one hundred
different herbicid and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and
green and artificially gassed until their skin acquire a marketable
hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yield , bur has also
produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium,
vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen
times more odium than the tomatoes our pareni:S enjoyed. The
relentless drive for low cosi:S has fostered a thriving modern-day
lave trade in the United rat . How have we come ro this point?
Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from ii:S birthplace
in the desert of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee,
Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United tates. He visii:S
the laboratories of eed men trying to develop varieties that can
with rand the rigor of agribusiness and still taste like a garden
tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate
on tens of thou ands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in
Pennsylvania, where he meei:S an ob ess d farmer who produces
delecrable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurant .
Throughout Tomato/and, Esrabrook presents a who's
who cast of character in the tomato industry: the avuncular
octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight
tomato eaten in the United tares; the ex-Marine who heads
the group that dictates the size, color, and hape of every tomato
shipped out of Florida; the U .. attorney who has doggedly
pro ecu red human traffickers for the past decade; and the
Guatemalan peasant who came north ro earn money for ni
parents' medical bills and found nim elf enslaved for two years.
Tomato/and reads like a suspen eful whodunit as well as an
e
expo of roday's agribusiness system and the price we pay as a
sociery when we take taste and thought our of our food purchases.

TOM AT OLAND
How Modern Industrial Agriculture
Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
BARRY ESTABROOK
Andrews McMeel
Publishing, LLC
Kansas City • Sydney • London
Tomato/and copyright© 2011 by Barry Estabrook. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States
of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC
an Andrews McMeel Universal company
1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 641 06
www.andrewsmcmeel.com
Portions of this book have appeared in different form in Gour111£t, Gastronomica, Saveur, and the
Washington Post.
1112131415RR210987654321
ISBN: 978-1-4494-0109-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010937751
ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES
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For the 111en and wo111en who pick the food we eat

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: On the Tomato Trail 1><
Roots 1
A Tomato Grows in Florida 19
Chemical Warfare 35
From the Hands of a S Ia ve 73
An Unfair Fight 97
A Penny per Pollnd 121
Matters of Taste 139
Bllilding a Better Tomato 153
Tomatoman 175
EpilogLJe: Wild Things 191
Notes 194
Bibliography 205
Index 207