Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit (Third)

By:

Synopsis

“An indictment of our modern agricultural system . . . in the tradition of the best muckraking journalism” from the three-time James Beard Award-winner (The Washington Post).

In Tomatoland, 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 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 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” (The New York Times).

Copyright:
2011

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
256 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781449493233
Related ISBNs:
9781449489533
Publisher:
Andrews McMeel Publishing
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Barry Estabrook
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Cooking, Food and Wine, Technology, Social Studies
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.
Foreword by:
Eric Schlosser

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