Estabrook’s “Tomatoland”: Serious-Minded Summer Reading

Posted by The Editorial Desk / Friday, June 10th, 2011

Those perfectly red, blemish-free orbs that greet you in the modern-day American supermarket produce section may be undeniably beautiful, but they are all style, no substance. Completely soulless, unpalatably mealy, and devoid of taste. But you can play a mean game of softball with them. What’s more, there is a whole sordid and ugly history belied by their flawless exterior, and former Gourmet contributing editor and food journalist Barry Estabrook is telling it. His latest book, “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit” (McMeel, 220 pp.), hit the stores this week. In a nut shell, tomatoes have come to represent everything that is wrong with our current agribusiness model of food production.

The book’s introductory chapter alone contains enough to make me want to hug my mother for her efforts in growing her own tomatoes in our little dusty backyard plot and seeking out farmers markets when they weren’t so in vogue:

-”100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less Vitamin C” and thiamin, “19 percent less niacin . . . 62 percent less calcium” and 14 times as much sodium as its 1960s counterpart.

-Due to the inhospitability of Florida’s humid climate for the originally dessert-dwelling tomatoes (the fruit’s wild ancestors came from the coastal desserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador), and consequently, the crop’s vulnerability to fungal diseases, 100 different herbicides and pesticides are commonly used in tomato harvesting. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found residues of thirty-five pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections.”

-And worst of all, “those cheap tomatoes that fill produce sections 365 days a year . . . come at a tremendous human cost.”  A tomato worker today is paid the same basic rate that a harvester received 30 years ago. This means that the harvester’s wages have actually dropped by half  taking into account inflation. Workers have also been sold to pay off so-called debts. They have been beaten, “held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks” and even murdered.

 Estabrook has recently spoken out quite eloquently regarding corporate holdouts such as Trader Joe’s to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food agreement and a penny-a-pound wage increase for tomato workers. To learn more about Estabrook’s important book, read reviews and an excerpt, visit his website.

-Johnisha M. Levi

Tags: Barry Estabrook, Fair Food, Gut Check, tomatoes, Tomatoland, Trader Joe's, USDA, wages