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Tomatoland
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit | Barry Estabrook
5 posts | 5 read | 12 to read
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.
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thegirlwiththelibrarybag
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Brings to mind the saying that knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit and wisdom is not adding it to a fruit salad...

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tpixie
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Jess my plants aren't as thick and full as yours. 3 peppers and 3 🍅 plants from Seed Savers, a squash from our local old-fashioned Market & the crazy straight thing is my cut and grow lettuce that I let go bad!

AmandaL You're inspiring me to garden better! 7y
tpixie Someday I want a real garden- but this way keeps the weeds out!! 7y
maich My garden is full of vegetables. 🍅🍆I must to water is every evening because there is really hot summer and drought. The grass became brown. 😯 7y
See All 11 Comments
tpixie @maich wow that is dry!! That's great you have a garden full of veggies! Someday I would like more varieties. 7y
Jess_Read_This These look great!!! I love how you eliminated the need to weed! What is the tall single plant in the pot by your pepper plant? 7y
Jess_Read_This @maich I have to do mine too for the post part but got lucky this week when it rained for three days in a row 7y
tpixie @Jess_Read_This the far right? It's my lettuce gone bad!! I just haven't had the heart to kill it yet! Lol. 7y
Jess_Read_This @tpixie It's so tall!! I didn't know lettuce gets that tall. I would leave it too.. I never have the heart to kill my plants. Especially the struggling ones. My "helpful" spouse pulled my cosmos that were struggling and I nursed back to health out thinking they were weeds. I cried. I don't know why I get so sentimental over a plant! He looked at me like I was a crazy lady... which may have been true at the time. ? 7y
tpixie @Jess_Read_This lol. I did eat a leaf the other day. They are pretty thick! Last year my lettuce did great. I'm not certain what happen this year. One died so I bought a squash plants and then this other one has just gone crazy. 7y
maich @Jess_Read_This We really miss rain😟 This weekend are temperature lower and we hope it will be raining. The next week will be again 40°C. 7y
tpixie @maich rain ☔️🍀☔️🍀 7y
74 likes11 comments
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Jess_Read_This
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?"According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame it's counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium."?

My organic, historic heirloom seed grown plant is thriving! First plants I've grown from seedlings.

Jess_Read_This 👆🏼I went overboard and have about 15 tomato plants.. after giving away about another 15 plants. I may have gotten carried away on Seed Savers Exchange this spring. Scary statistics though how our food quality has changed over the decades! #tomato #gardening #summertime. (edited) 7y
EchoLogical I'm curious to know how this came to be. Any idea? 7y
tpixie @Jess_Read_This I started with 3 little tomato and 3 pepper plants from Seed Savers Exchange. Congrats 🎈 on being brave enough to start from seeds! Having 15 plants may give you enough tomatoes at one time to make something with it. I just have three tomato plants and so I usually just eat them right off the vine because they don't I don't get enough at one time to make a sauce or salsa 💃🏻 7y
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Jess_Read_This @EchoLogical I don't have the full picture, I just discovered this book. I am thinking part of the problem is the creation of hybrids that are "resistant" to insects and disease. This hybridization (or GMO) alters the structure of the plant. The description in the synopsis of the pesticides used in commercial growing is scary. But I had no idea the nutritional composition has changed too! I always thought my store bought ones taste salty too!! 7y
Jess_Read_This @tpixie Oh cool! This is my first year buying from SSE and love the company! I planted 3 different pumpkin varieties too. Post pics of your plants! I usually eat them off the vine too.. and make tomato sandwiches and caprese salads. I have to figure something out this year.. I'm the only one in my house that eats tomatos! Salsa might be the thing! 7y
JanuarieTimewalker13 That's so scary. I think it's bc the soil suffers from all the pesticides, also. 7y
EchoLogical @Jess_Read_This Yeah store bought tomatoes are pretty salty. It's sad because you think you're eating fairly decent by using more fresh ingredients only to discover the food isn't as nutritious as you think. 😔 7y
tpixie @Jess_Read_This pumpkin sounds fun!! I'll post a picture- but your tomato 🍅 plants are beautiful!! 7y
AmandaL I planted sweet potatoes and heirloom green beans this year. So far the rain has destroyed my green beans. I have to wait one more month to see how my sweet potatoes faired. 7y
Scurvygirl Between the pesticides and preservatives we have been ingesting our whole lives, it's no wonder people are sick with food allergies and chronic illness. I love my garden, your tomatoes look great! 7y
tpixie @AmandaL good luck 🍀🍀🍀 7y
AmandaL @tpixie Thank you! I need it! 7y
Debiw781 Ahhhh you're making me miss my tomato plants! It was too dry to plant this spring ☹️ 7y
Jess_Read_This @AmandaL Sweet potatoes?! How cool! How do you plant them? Post a pic! I'm such a novice gardener and have no clue how potatoes grow.. other than they need to be in dirt. Lol! (edited) 7y
Jess_Read_This @Debiw781 Oh no! Try porch pots! My brother does his in porch pots and loves to send me bragging pictures how his are already turning red and I'm still impatiently waiting on my green ones to turn. 7y
Jess_Read_This @Scurvygirl Thank you! I couldn't agree more with you about the preservatives and pesticides we are ingesting. It's scary! I often say we are mummifying ourselves from the inside out with all the preservatives that are in food now. 7y
82 likes2 stack adds16 comments
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queerbookreader
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Ayyyyyyyyyy new books. Pumped as hell for the Moxham because the description sounds like it's just a massive roast of British imperialism which I am always here for👌🏽 Excited that I also found Stuffed & Starved at my library! #nonfiction #lookatme #notreadingfantasytrashforonce

MrBook Oooh, I love this stack! #NiceStack! 8y
LeahBergen I love tea books. 8y
Titania It's been a long time since I've read Twinkie, Deconstructed, but as a chemical engineer, it hit my buttons. 8y
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queerbookreader @Titania As in you thought the book was garbage? Or you agreed with it? I just started Pandora's Lunchbox and chpt 1 is all about food scientists. (also I worship you for being a chemical engineer, that's so cool 🙌🏽) 8y
Hugoreads Your book stack looks like my own! I read obsessively about nutrition, food, health etc. And of course (vegan) cookbooks too! Currently reading "Food Over Medicine" by Pamela Popper. 8y
Beholderess So much food history here! 8y
27 likes1 stack add6 comments
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BethFishReads
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Found these beauties at the farmers market today. Red zebras, I think. Far, fat, far from the tomatoes described in this book. (A good read, by the way.)

LauraBeth These look delicious! 8y
BethFishReads @LauraBeth they taste as good as they look 8y
DebinHawaii I read this one a few years ago. It was a good read and these tomatoes look delicious! 🍅🍅🍅 8y
44 likes3 stack adds4 comments