Barry Estabrook
Author of Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
About the Author
A three-time James Beard Award winner, Barry Estabrook is a former contributing editor at Gourmet magazine and the author of Tomatoland, a book about industrial tomato agriculture. He blogs at politicsoftheplate.com and lives in Vermont.
Works by Barry Estabrook
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit (2011) 483 copies, 20 reviews
Lunar Yeomanry 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 20th Century
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Vermont, USA
- Organizations
- Gourmet
Members
Reviews
Very good book although it became pretty tiresome after yet another anecdote about worker mistreatment.It felt like 100! Was a bit uneven in spots. For instance, he seems to blithely ignore that, at least for some people, tomatoes not easy to grow at home (poor soil, pests, etc). Nor does he talk about the diversity in seed catalogs and why it persists. But I did enjoy the comprehensive history lesson about a vegetable (excuse me, I meant to say fruit) that I never before thought much about
You will learn a lot about where your pork comes from. This was easy reading. The author doesn't go around bashing farmers on how they are raising their pigs. He was truly on a quest to see if there were really better ways to raise pigs, and there were. He interviewed citizens way out in the country where hog farms had popped up out of nowhere and how it affected their everyday lives. You will be shocked to hear their stories. It's a very interesting read.
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 6
- Also by
- 9
- Members
- 596
- Popularity
- #42,151
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 27
- ISBNs
- 27
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
--PRINT: © June 7, 2011; 978-1449401092; Andrews McMeel Publishing; First Edition; 240 pages; unabridged. (Hardcover info from Amazon.com)
--DIGITAL: © June 7, 2011; Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC; 244 pages; unabridged. (Kindle info from Amazon.com)
-- (this one) *AUDIO: © September 30, 2011; Tantor Audio; Duration: 7 hours and 11 minutes; unabridged. (Audio info from Amazon.com)
--FILM: No, but I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find something related on YouTube by this author.
SERIES: No
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: Don purchased this book and we’ve had it for years. I’m starting with the oldest in our Audible collection and working my way up, just to feel like we’re getting our money’s worth out of these purchases. That’s not to say the subject doesn’t interest me though.
ABOUT: This is about Florida, the tomato growing capital of the US and how ill suited it actually is, considering all the pests, the weather, (and corrupt growers). It discusses the toxicity and effects of multiple pesticides on humans (consumers and pickers alike). It reveals the many atrocities that agricultural workers withstood (withstand?) under many of the large growers and their subcontractors—human trafficking, slavery, squalid living conditions. It discusses the processes tomatoes, particularly Winter Tomatoes undergo before arriving on grocery store shelves. Toward the end, is a discussion of a coalition of farm workers, conscientious tomato growers, and conscientious grocery stores. So, what I’m not sure of, is whether, or to what degree the conditions discussed in the early chapters still exist.
OVERALL OPINION: Informative. I didn’t realize such flagrantly inhumane conditions existed on farms in this day and age, or how unhealthy a tomato sitting
AUTHOR:
Barry Estabrook:
“ James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook was a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine for eight years, writing investigative articles about where food comes from. He was the founding editor of Eating Well magazine and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Reader's Digest, Men's Health, Audubon, and the Washington Post, and contributes regularly to The Atlantic Monthly's website. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Food Writing series, and he has been interviewed on numerous television and radio shows. He lives and grows tomatoes in his garden in Vermont.” __From Simon and Schuster
NARRATOR(S):
Pete Larkin:
“Pete Larkin is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and a 2014 Audie Award finalist. He has wide voice-over and on-camera experience and has worked in virtually all media. He was the public address announcer for the New York Mets from 1988 to 1993. He has worked as a disc jockey in Baltimore, Washington, and New York, including as host of WNEW-FM's highly rated "Saturday Morning Sixties" program. An award-winning on-camera host, Pete has worked on many industrial films for many of the country's top companies, corporations, and governmental agencies and has done hundreds of commercials, promos, and narrations. His theater experience includes a variety of dramatic, comedic, and musical roles.” __From Tanto Media
GENRE:
Nonfiction; Food
SUBJECTS:
Science; History; Agriculture; Environment; Politics; Gardening; Health; Nature; Toxic pesticides; Slavery; Farm laborers; Human Trafficking; Tomatoes; Florida, Corruption, Immigrants
DEDICATION:
“For the men and women who pick the food we eat.”
SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From the introduction: “ON THE TOMATO TRAIL”
“My obituary’s headline would have read “Food Writer Killed by Flying Tomato.”
On a visit to my parents’ condominium in Naples, Florida, I was mindlessly driving along the flat, straight pavement of I-75, when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida’s rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. But as I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was top heavy with what seemed to be green Granny Smith apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Chastened, I eased back into my lane and let the truck get several car lengths ahead. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A ten-foot drop followed by a sixty-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.
If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Although tomatoes are farmed commercially in about twenty states, Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds to the United States, Canada, and other countries every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial-scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy-red skin tones of a ripe tomato.
Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless commercially grown fresh tomatoes in 2009—our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn’t mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket (or even the farmers’ market), but there’s a reason you don’t hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.
Beauty, in thiPerhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. 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 its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.
A couple of winters ago, I bought an assortment of supermarket tomatoes and brought them home for a tasting. I put four on the counter and reached for a cutting board, accidentally nudging one. I was too slow to stop it and watched as it rolled off the counter and fell on our newly refinished pine floor. It hit and traveled for a few feet but incurred no damage. As I retrieved it, my partner came into the kitchen, and I tossed the tomato at her playfully. She shrieked and dodged, and my hardy store-bought tomato struck the floor with the solid thud of a baking potato. I bowled the fruit through the kitchen door, across the dining room, over a wooden threshold, onto the tile floor of the sunroom, where The Tomato That Would Not Die crashed against the door. No damage done.
The best way to experience true tomato taste is to grow your own. Little wonder that tomatoes are by far the most popular vegetable for home gardeners, found in nearly nine out of ten backyard plots. Both The Tomato That Would Not Die and the heirloom Brandywines in my Vermont garden are of the species Solanum lycopersicum, and both are red. But the similarity ends there. My Brandywines are downright homely—lumpy, deeply creased, and scarred, they look like badly sunburned Rubens derrieres. Nor are they made for travel. More often than not, one will spontaneously split during the twenty-five-yard stroll from garden to kitchen. If not eaten within a day or so after being picked, they develop brownish bruises and begin leaking a watery orange liquid. But that rarely happens. Around our place, Brandywines go fast. They may be ugly. And fragile. Yet there is no better-tasting tomato than a garden-ripe Brandywine. With sweetness and tartness playing off each other perfectly, and juices that burst into your mouth in a surge that forces you to abandon all pretext of good table manners and to slurp, a real tomato’s taste is the distilled essence of sun, warm soil, and fine summer days.
Not everyone can grow a garden or head out to a neighborhood farmers’ market in search of the ideal tomato. But we all have an alternative to the sad offerings of commercial agriculture. At a lunch spot in the town where I live, a handwritten notation appeared on the blackboard listing the daily specials one June afternoon. “Dear Customers, we will not be putting tomatoes on our sandwiches until we can obtain ones that meet our standards. Thanks.” With that small insurrection, the restaurant’s proprietor had articulated a philosophy that more of us should embrace: Insist on eating food that meets our standards only, not the standards set by corporate agriculture.
Organic, local, seasonal, fresh, sustainable, fair trade—the words have become platitudes that skeptics associate with foodie elitists who can afford to shop at natural food stores and have kitchens that boast $5,000 ranges and larders filled with several varieties of vinegar, extra-virgin olive oil, and “natural” sea salt. It’s easy to forget that those oft-repeated words do mean something. Florida’s tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated.
This book began as an attempt to answer what I thought were a couple of simple questions. Why can’t (or won’t) modern agribusiness deliver a decent tasting tomato? And why can’t it grow one with a similar nutritional profile to the tomatoes available to any housewife during the Kennedy administration? My investigations into the mysteries of modern tomato production took me on a circuitous journey from my garden in New England to a research greenhouse at the University of California Davis, to the rocky fields of a struggling produce farmer in Pennsylvania, and to the birthplace of tomatoes in the remote coastal deserts of northern Peru. But I always found myself coming back to where it all started for me—Florida.
So, why can’t we walk into a supermarket in December and buy the tomato of our dreams? Part of the reason is that it is essentially against the law. Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don’t conform to what the all-powerful Florida Tomato Committee says a tomato should look like. The cartel-like Committee exercises Orwellian control over tomato exports from the state, and it decrees that slicing tomatoes shipped from South Florida in the winter must be flawlessly smooth, evenly round, and of a certain size. Taste is not a consideration.
If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow. Tomato production in the state has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology. Florida is warm when the rest of the East and Midwest—within easy striking distance for a laden produce truck—is cold. But Florida is notoriously humid. Tomatoes’ wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on earth. Taken to Spain, Italy, and southern France in the 1500s, they thrived in the Mediterranean’s sunny, rainless summers. They flourish in the dry heat of California, home to the U.S. canned tomato industry, which is completely distinct from the fresh-market tomato industry. Canning tomatoes and fresh tomatoes may as well be apples and oranges. When forced to struggle in the wilting humidity of Florida, tomatoes become vulnerable to all manner of fungal diseases. Hordes of voracious hoppers, beetles, and worms chomp on their roots, stems, leaves, and fruit. And although Florida’s sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. Florida growers may as well be raising their plants in a sterile hydroponic medium. To get a successful crop, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can 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 U.S. Department of Agriculture has found residues of thirty-five pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarket produce sections.
All of this might have a perverse logic to it if tomato growing were a highly lucrative, healthy business. But it isn’t. As large as most of them are, Florida’s tomato companies are struggling, always one disaster or disappointing year away from insolvency. Cheap tomatoes from Mexico stream across the border during the winter months. Advances in hydroponic technology have enabled greenhouse tomatoes from Canada and the northern states to eat into Florida’s market share during the spring and fall. The industry was nearly dealt a fatal blow in 2008 when it suffered more than $100 million in lost sales after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration erroneously put fresh Florida tomatoes on a shortlist of suspects responsible for a massive salmonella outbreak. Growers lost a similar amount two years later when three-quarters of their plants died during a prolonged freeze. Even at the best of times, commodity tomato farming is a high-stakes gamble. When the replanted fields did eventually ripen after the 2010 cold snap, tomatoes glutted the market and prices dropped so low that it wasn’t even worthwhile for growers to harvest their crops. Millions of dollars of perfectly edible tomatoes were left to rot in the fields.
An industrial tomato grower has no control over what he spends on fuel, fertilizer (which requires enormous quantities of natural gas in its manufacture), and pesticides, but he can control what he pays the men and women who plant, tend, and harvest his crops. This has put a steady downward pressure on the earnings of tomato workers. Those cheap tomatoes that fill produce sections 365 days a year, year in and year out, come at a tremendous human cost. Although there have been recent improvements, a person picking tomatoes receives the same basic rate of pay he received thirty years ago. Adjusted for inflation, a harvester’s wages have actually dropped by half over the same period. Florida tomato workers, mostly Hispanic migrants, toil without union protection and get neither overtime, benefits, nor medical insurance. They are denied basic legal rights that virtually all other laborers enjoy. Lacking their own vehicles, they have to live near the fields, often paying rural slumlords exorbitant rents to be crammed with ten or a dozen other farmworkers in moldering trailers with neither heat nor air conditioning and which would be condemned outright in any other American jurisdiction.”
RATING: 4 stars.
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