3.5
Tomatoland
ByPublisher Description
In
, investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. He 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
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.
reads like a suspenseful whodunit and is "at its most potent and scathing in its portrayal of South Florida's tomato growers and their tactics over the past half-century" (
).
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About Barry Estabrook
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 Estabrook that writing about how food is produced is a hell of a lot easier than actually producing it. For several blissful years, he received a steady paycheck from the late, lamented Gourmet magazine. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Eating Well, Smithsonian, Reader's Digest, Saveur, Epicurious, OnEarth, and AtlanticLife.com. He also blogs at www.politicsoftheplate.com. He has won the prestigious Migrant Justice Award and three James Beard Awards and lives on a 30-acre plot in Vermont where he putters around in a large vegetable garden (a great place for a procrastinating writer), tends a small flock of laying hens, makes maple syrup, and brews some of the vilest hard cider on the planet.
Other books by Barry Estabrook
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