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Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Hardcover – June 7, 2011
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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.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAndrews McMeel Publishing
- Publication dateJune 7, 2011
- Dimensions6 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
- ISBN-101449401090
- ISBN-13978-1449401092
- Lexile measure1280L
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Editorial Reviews
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"With great skill and compassion, Estabrook explores the science, ingenuity, and human misery behind the modern American tomato. Once again, the true cost is too high to pay." --Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation
"In my ten years as editor of Gourmet magazine, the article I am proudest to have published was Barry Estabrook's 'The Price of Tomatoes.' Now he's expanded that into this astonishingly moving and important book. If you have ever eaten a tomato--or ever plan to--you must read Tomatoland. It will change the way you think about America's most popular 'vegetable.' More importantly, it will give you new insight into the way America farms." --Ruth Reichl, author of Garlic and Sapphires
"If you worry, as I do, about the sad and sorry state of the tomato today, and want to know what a tomato used to be like and what it could hopefully become again, read Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland. This book is a fascinating history of the peregrination of the tomato throughout the centuries." --Jacques Pépin, author of the forthcoming Essential Pepin
"In fast-moving, tautly narrated scenes, Barry Estabrook tells the startling story of labor conditions that should not exist in this country or this century, and makes sure you won't look at a supermarket or fast-food tomato the same way again. But he also gives hope for a better future--and a better tomato. Anyone who cares about social justice should read Tomatoland. Also anyone who cares about finding a good tomato you can feel good about eating." --Corby Kummer, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The Pleasures of Slow Food
" `Tomatoland' (is) in the tradition of the best muckraking journalism, from Upton Sinclair's `The Jungle' to Eric Schlosser's `Fast Food Nation.' " ----Jane Black, The Washington Post
"Masterful." ----Mark Bittman, New York Times Opinion blog
"If you care about social justice--or eat tomatoes--read this account of the past, present, and future of a ubiquitous fruit." ----Corby Kummer, TheAtlantic.com
"Eye-opening exposé...thought-provoking." ----Publishers Weekly
"Estabrook adds some new dimensions to the outrageous...story of an industry that touches nearly every one of us living in fast-food nation." ----David Von Drehle, Time Magazine blog "Swampland"
"You can really stop at any point during the narrative and decide that you've bought your last supermarket tomato, but Estabrook is just warming up...a brisk read, engrossing as it is enraging." --TheDailyGreen.com
"Corruption, deception, slavery, chemical and biological warfare, courtroom dramas, undercover sting operations and murder: Tomatoland is not your typical book on fruit." --Macleans.ca
About the Author
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- Publisher : Andrews McMeel Publishing; First Edition (June 7, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1449401090
- ISBN-13 : 978-1449401092
- Lexile measure : 1280L
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,251,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #466 in Agriculture Industry (Books)
- #507 in Fruit Cooking
- #664 in Sustainable Agriculture (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Youthful stints doing slug labor on a midwestern dairy farm (hot!) and being tossed about on a commercial fishing boat off Nova Scotia (frigid!) taught me that writing about how food is produced is a hell of a lot easier than actually producing it. For several blissful years, I received a steady paycheck from the late, lamented Gourmet magazine. Now I write for the New York Times, Saveur, Epicurious, OnEarth, AtlanticLife.com--pretty much anyone who will pay me. I also blog at www.politicsoftheplate.com, which received the 2011 James Beard Award for best food blog. I live on a 30-acre plot in Vermont where I putter around in a large vegetable garden (a great place for a procrastinating writer), tend a small flock of laying hens, make maple syrup, and brew some of the vilest hard cider on the planet.
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Barry is a highly regarded journalist and was for many years a contributing editor for the late Gourmet magazine. His writing has been featured in the Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post and other publications. He was the founding editor of Eating Well magazine. Barry recently received a James Beard Award for his blog: [...]
Florida produces about one-third of the fresh tomatoes grown in the US and sold to supermarkets and big box stores such as Wal-Mart. This is where "winter tomatoes", that can be purchased in January in Chicago for example, most likely originate. In addition, these tomatoes from Florida are used by fast-food operations such as McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Chipolte.
Florida's soil is quite sandy and theoretically inhospitable to the growth of tomatoes and other vegetables. To solve this problem tomato growers use an extensive array of highly toxic chemicals. Actually, Florida growers use 8 times as many chemicals on their fields as similarly sized fields in California. The tomatoes are then picked green, before ripeness, and gassed with ethylene to create the desired red coloration. A typical consumer of these tomatoes may also be consuming chemicals such as metribuzin (herbicide), mancozeb (fungicide) and avermectin (insecticide), all three of which, per the author, are known to be "developmental and reproductive toxins". Sometimes tear gas is even added to what the author calls a "witches brew" of highly toxic chemicals. The tomatoes are rubbery, capable of bouncing across a kitchen floor without breaking, and completely tasteless.
The author describes in meticulous detail several situations, such as in the Ag-Mart Produce fields, in which the toxins are knowingly and aggressively sprayed at the very same time workers are tending to the crops in the same fields, even in the next row. What results, for women working there who may be pregnant, is the strong likelihood of a still birth or a child born with severe disabilities. The author describes one child, Carlito, who was born with no arms or legs. Another child, Violetta, was born with no anus, no sex organs and other horrible deformities. Three days after her birth, she died. Both of these children mothers had worked in the Ag-Mart fields and had been subjected to direct contact with a variety of toxic chemicals in their daily work. The grower was in blatant violation of US EPA rules in spraying a field while workers were present and not allowing a specific amount of time to lapse before workers were allowed into the field. With no enforcement capability, bribery of inspectors, actual threats of violence and extortion of workers by their employers, nothing was likely to be done in many of these tragic cases. In the case of Carlito, a social worker eventually referred his family to an attorney, Andrew Yaffa, who was working with farm workers in a number of cases. After three years he was able to procure an undisclosed settlement to assist the family with Carlito's care.
The damage to the environment by the use of a wide array of highly toxic chemicals is further described in a story about Lake Apopka, at one time the fourth largest lake in Florida and home to a variety of wildlife, including wide-mouthed bass. Farming of tomatoes began here in the 1940's when swamp land was drained to grow produce in support of what was called the "wartime effort". Farming continued there, with of course the accompanying wide use of highly toxic chemicals, into the mid 1990's. The lake turned green and became the most highly polluted body of water in Florida. The fish of course were long gone and migratory birds were no longer present. Farming was eventually curtailed with local landowners bought out, at a profit, by the state. Attempts to rebuild the natural habitat have been a failure. When various migratory birds returned, they died. However, the farm workers, mostly African-Americans, were left behind, many suffering from a variety of illnesses, including kidney failure, Lupus, arthritis, vision problems and other disabilities. They to this date have received absolutely no compensation for the disabling injuries and diseases which are a direct result of Florida's agricultural practices and persistent violations of EPA regulations. Recently the Tea Party favorite and current Florida governor, Rick Scott, vetoed a state budget bill that would have provided a settlement to these workers. (Scott, a multimillionaire, was forced to resign as CEO of the Columbia HCA health care organization in the late 1990's after the company pleaded guilty to a variety of fraudulent Medicare billing practices and agreed to a $600 million settlement with the federal government.)
There are no buffer zones between the fields and the local communities, allowing the chemicals being sprayed to blow into schools, homes, and even churches. In one instance, described by the author, parishioners attending a church service had to leave, feeling quite unwell during the service as methyl bromide combined with tear gas was being sprayed in near-by fields on a Sunday morning.
In addition to the discussion of the extensive use of highly toxic, carcinogenic chemicals in tomato farming in Florida, what I found to be most stunning and horrifying was the reporting on the modern day slavery and utterly immoral abuse of farm workers in the rural area known as Immokalee, located about 50 miles from Naples, FL. The inhumane and illegal conditions suffered by migrant workers just 50 miles from one of the wealthiest communities in the US have existed for many years. It does not matter if a Democrat or Republican is governor, a US Senator or even President of the United States. The labor is cheap, the workers, mostly migrants who barely even speak English, are silent and fearful, and the abuse has continued. Coyotes (smugglers of human beings) routinely charge exorbitant fees to transport workers into the US, crowding them into stifling, dark trailer trucks, trading them off to another coyote as though they were a commodity, and sending them to live in conditions not even fit for a stray dog - in broken down trailers, shacks, tents hidden away in the woods with minimal food and a complete lack of sanitary conditions for cooking and bathing. The workers were subject to forced labor for long hours and could be beaten or fired for the most minor of things, such as taking a bathroom break or having a drink of water. Workers were routinely cheated out of wages and were not paid for transportation time or any other down time in the fields. Growers, such as Ag-Mart, even charged a worker $5 to take a cold shower under a garden hose, out in the open, after a typical 12+ hour day. They were paid by bushel of tomatoes picked (anywhere from 50 cents a bushel to at the most $1), not on any sort of hourly fair wage basis. They were not paid for transportation to and from the fields, meal breaks, or any downtime. Of course, they had no health insurance, worker's compensation for injuries, or unemployment insurance. How they survived at all is really hard to imagine.
Through the efforts of pro bono attorneys, social workers, church groups, and local organizations such as the "Coalition of Immokalee Workers", efforts are being made to file lawsuits and work for better conditions for the migrant workers. Several cases in particular are described in detail, including cases involving human trafficking, harboring and abusing aliens, unlawful detention (forced labor) and attempts to deny workers their salaries.
Lucas Domingo was hired onto the Navarette family operation. Domingo arrived here illegally. He was promised housing, meals, and what sounded to him to be a decent wage. He needed to send money home to support a sick parent. Instead, Domingo was sent to live in a "box trailer" in the backyard of a Navarette property, living in the trailer with 3 other workers and no toilet, much less a shower. Meals were of very poor quality and infrequent. Workers typically ran up debts to the manager, in this case Cesar Navarette. Wages were then taken from them to pay off these loans. When the workers threatened to leave they were severely beaten and locked up in the residences, these trailers, abandoned vans, and shacks, in the backyard. After 3 years of this, two workers on the Navarette property managed to escape one night. Miraculously, they made their way to CIW, the Coalition of Imokkalee Workers. After telling their stories to local law enforcement authorities, three Navarette brothers and their mother were indicted for among other things, forcing slavery. This is of course a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution which assures the right to be free of involuntary servitude. Sentences handed down after plea deals by the Navarettes included deportation to Mexico for the mother, 12 year sentences for 2 of the brothers, and almost 4 years for another brother.
Also discussed in detail are the efforts over many years to get large markets and fast food operations to agree to support the payment of better wages to the farm workers. Of course these corporations tended to resist efforts at reform for a number of years. Some, including Whole Foods Market, YUM Brands (which owns several fast food chains), certain major supermarket chains eventually agreed to support improved conditions and better wages for workers. To this day, however, Trader Joe's is holding out! Throughout the book there are also discussions of the failings of various elected officials, from Presidents on down, to correct the blatant wrongs being done with these deplorable agricultural practices.
The final chapters in the book report on some successes, overall ending the book on a positive note. There is the successful organic farmer, Tom Beddard of Lady Moon Farms, who sells his produce to among others, Whole Foods Market. Gregory Schell, an attorney who went to Harvard Law School with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, is now working on migrant worker issues and has successfully won a number of court cases in an attempt to change conditions for workers around the country. Barbara Mainster is a teacher working with the Redlands Christian Migrant Association in providing child care, education, and other services to low income families living in farm worker migrant camps in the area. Steven Kirk has worked with others to provide decent housing for migrant workers, beginning his projects in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. And finally, there is the lovable Tim Stark, a Princeton graduate who farms organically on his farm, Eckerton Hill Farm, in eastern Pennsylvania. Tim has quite a following at the Greenmarket in Union Square and also sells his produce to upscale trendy restaurants in New York. However, I remain haunted by the deplorable conditions of the migrant workers involved in our food production and the serious damage being done to the environment. I really hope Barry's book gets much wider recognition and is included on the summer reading list for not just all of us normal people, but for government officials, non-profits, and religious groups who are in more of a position to do something about this. (What are the Obama's reading this summer?)
Estabrook, an avowed "Foodie" and admitted hobby gardener, does a very good job of setting out to answer the questions he started with and telling the story that developed in the process. He starts out by taking the reader to South America on a germplasm collection trip with Roger Chetelat, the Director of the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center housed on the UC Davis Campus. The point is to explain the concepts of `area of origin' and `area of diversification' for the many species of wild tomatoes that are related to the cultivated form and how important they are to ongoing efforts to breed new traits into the cultivated tomato, Solanum lycopersicum. He also introduces the reader to C.M. "Charlie" Rick, the legendary tomato breeder and germplasm curator; a man who influenced my own career as a Professor Emeritus guest lecturer when I was an undergraduate and graduate student. He introduces the reader to the 19th century tomato breeder and seedsman Alexander W. Livingston and his variety `Paragon'. Later in the book he introduces the reader to two contemporary breeders in Florida, John Warner Scott who developed the Tasti-Lee as a flavorful tomato that would yield well and could be transported long distances when vine-ripe. He then introduces Harry Klee who is also working on breeding better tasting tomatoes. In the process, the reader is treated to a very good introduction on post-harvest physiology of tomatoes and the food science behind the aromatic flavor profile of tomatoes. Good stuff!!!!
However, most of the book describes the large-scale production of field grown, fresh-market tomatoes in Florida. Again, the author provides a very good overview of the history and introduces many of the key players. The poor handling of agricultural chemicals and exposure to them by field workers as well as the systematic abuse of migrant workers by third party Labor Contractors is appalling and seems a bit hard to believe from my perspective. I have run large farms in CA and have held a state issued Pest Control Advisor's License as well as a Qualified Applicator's License. The type of abuse and misuse the author describes as common place in Florida is unheard of and unthinkable in California based upon my twenty plus years of field experience. In fact, the author does continually compare and contrast CA to FL: "An acre of Florida tomatoes gets hit with five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as an acre of California tomatoes" (p. 27)., "Despite all those chemicals being spread across its fields, Florida has an abysmal record when it comes to protecting its farmworkers, employing only about fifty inspectors (ten were hastily added following the media furor surrounding the birth of the deformed Immokalee babies) compared to California's 350." (p.41), "In both Florida and California, physicians are required to report cases of pesticide poisoning. But in Florida that law is unenforced and ignored." (p.41), "...levels of the toxic gas drifting off nearby fields had risen as high as 625 parts per billion, three times the maximum allowable amount set by the government of California (Florida has no standards)..."(p.50).
The author, though he clearly tried to deliver an unbiased and fair description of the Florida tomato industry, is betrayed by some of his descriptive word choices:
In regard to the Florida Tomato Committee, "The cartel-like Committee exercises Orwellian control over tomato exports from the state.......Taste is not a consideration." (pp. xii-xiii).
"Florida's tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated." (p. xii).
"Florida growers......to get a successful crop....blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness's arsenal." (p. xiii)
"Green, cheap, and off-season continue to be the three mercantile legs upon which Florida's tomato industry stands." (p.8)
"From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective, you would have to be an idiot to attempt to commercially grow tomatoes in a place like Florida." (p. 20).
"But for tomatoes to survive long enough to take advantage of that huge potential market, Florida growers have to wage what amounts to total war against the elements. Forget the Hague Convention: We're talking about chemical, biological, and scorched-earth warfare against the forces of nature." (p.21)
For the most part, the author did a pretty good job on the technical aspects of farming and breeding tomatoes. Sometimes when journalists try to write about a technical subject they make a lot of glaring errors (which for some reason are not caught by technically savvy editors). However, there is one statement in the book that I certainly need to address. On page 30 the author wrote, in reference to California growers of tomatoes for processing, "Fortunately for them, the canning varieties are determinant, meaning that their vines stop growing and most of their fruits ripen at the same time. Growers kill the plants with herbicide, then harvest the fruits with machines that winnow the fruits from desiccated vines and leaves and deposit them into trucks." Just from a logical point of view, this clearly stands out as a nonsensical statement. If the plants are determinant and begin to naturally senesce, why would there be need to kill the vines with herbicide for harvest? Having spent several summers working in the fields for the tomato canneries, I can answer that question. Tomato harvesting machines undercut and lift the entire plant into the machine and shake the fruit off; dirt, undersized tomatoes and green tomatoes are mechanically and optically sorted from the product stream. The harvesters can handle fairly large, green, vigorous plants easily. Once the fruit has matured and ripened on the vine the growers would actually prefer the plants maintain some foliage cover to keep the fruit from sun burning. Each load is graded for fruit color, brix (sugar), mold and greens among other things. Rejected loads are returned to the field to be dumped, at the grower's expense. In researching pesticide labels, I could only find two herbicides, gramoxone and paraquat, labeled for use on tomatoes, but only AFTER the fruit is harvested to kill the vines (this is probably for fresh-market tomatoes and has no application in processing tomatoes). Processing tomato growers will sometimes use the plant growth regulator (PGR, like a hormone) called Ethrel (Bayer CropScience) late in the season as days shorten and nights become cooler to shutdown the vegetative growth of plants and initiate the ripening of any fruits already set on the plant. When it is applied, the plant quickly breaks it down and produces ethylene, the same gas used to ripen or "degreen" fresh market tomatoes picked in Florida.
Top reviews from other countries
I love tomatoes. But I love good tomatoes. What we buy in the grocery store aren't good tomatoes. I produced a film on food and farming in 2015 and one of the things I covered was tomatoes. There are a lot of reasons why grocery store tomatoes aren't good. Mostly it comes down to scientists and laboratories.
The conditions described of the Florida farm workers is horrendous. If you watched the 3rd season of American Crime and think that may have been overhyped, or overdone, in terms of the conditions, you'd be wrong. It undersold the problems/issues. This book goes into much more detail.
The writing is a bit dry and matter-of-fact in places, but it's a very informative read and it does outline how conditions have been improving through the hard work of farm workers who were willing to stand up to the farm owners and demand improvements in pay, benefits and working conditions.






