Book Review: Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook

Posted by Todd Heft on December 6, 2011 in Environment, Food, Gardening Book Reviews, Vegetable & Fruit Gardening | 2 comments

Tomatoland is a great book. A dark, scary, underbelly-of-the-ag-industry book.

If you’ve ever eaten a tomato in the winter and you live in a latitude where winter means snow, perhaps you’ve wondered how a tomato appeared in your market when it was cold enough outside to freeze honey. According to Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland,if you live in the Northeast U.S.,that tomato most likely came from Florida.

Tomatoland begins as Estabrook is driving through Florida, following a tractor trailer truck which he believes is loaded with Granny Smith apples. After a few sail off the truck and hit his car, he examines the projectiles only to discover that they’re hard, indestructible green tomatoes. Thus begins Estabrook’s journey into how multi-billion dollar corporations have turned a delicious fruit into something unsavory.

Florida, it turns out, has one of the worst climates and worst soils in which to grow tomatoes. The air is very humid (tomatoes prefer bone dry), which makes the plants very susceptible to a litany of fungal diseases; tomatoes did not evolve in Florida, so they haven’t adapted to the insect life there-consequently hordes of pests continuously munch on the plants; and the soil is sandy and porous and devoid of nutrients (tomatoes prefer loamy soils). As a result, tomatoes in Florida are awash in a mind boggling amount of fertilizers and pesticides. “To get a successful crop, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and..blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal. Workers are exposed to these chemicals on a daily basis. The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens, and babies born with horrendous birth defects. Not all the chemicals stay behind in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The US Department of Agriculture has found residues of thirty-five pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections.”

So why bother growing tomatoes in a climate so inhospitable? Because Florida is within trucking distance of major metropolitan centers like Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston and New York City.

“Ground zero for modern day slavery”

The most striking revelation in Tomatolandis the abhorrent treatment of Florida’s field workers, many of whom have entered the country illegally, speak no English and have an inherent fear of law enforcement. Thus, the workers’ abuse goes largely unreported for fear of reprisals. “In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, South Florida’s tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”… In the last fifteen years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than one thousand men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will… Workers were “sold” to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they…were too sick or weak to work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse. Corpses of murdered farm workers were not an uncommon sight in the rivers and canals of South Florida. Even though police have successfully prosecuted seven major slavery cases in the state in the last fifteen years, those brought to justice were low ranking field managers… The wealthy owners of the vast farms walked away scot-free.”

But Tomatoland isn’t all downside. Estabrook also explores the origins of the tomato on the shores of Ecuador, where botanists believe it originated, its domestication by Mayan farmers in ancient Mexico, its introduction to Europe by Spanish explorers, its further development by the British for its believed curative powers and its extensive modern breeding in North America. He also spends some time with a chemical-free tomato grower from eastern Pennsylvania nicknamed Tomatoman who sells gourmet tomatoes on the streets of New York City and supplies fine restaurants there. Tomatoman’s tomatoes are so popular and so delicious that he can barely keep up with demand.

Estabrook is extremely deft at weaving all of these elements into what sometimes is a mystery and is always an exciting story of great discoveries in Tomatoland.

Barnes & Noble Nook Book: Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

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