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Review: Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook

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

tomatoland by barry estabrook
 Buy on Amazon: Tomatoland, Third Edition: From Harvest of Shame to Harvest of Hope 

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 of the fruit-in-question 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.

Why are so many tomatoes grown in Florida when the weather is the worst for growing them?

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 (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.Barry Estaboork, Tomatoland

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

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“Ground zero for modern-day slavery”

The most striking revelation in Tomatoland is 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.Barry Estaboork, Tomatoland

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.

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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.

2 thoughts on “Review: Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook”

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  2. A plan for healthy living diet should consist of the consumption of many fruits and vegetables but also a lot of lean protein in your meal plan.

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