Pizza, pasta, salad, sandwich — the tomato regularly makes its way to the center of the American dinner plate. Squirted from a McDonald’s ketchup dispenser, toasted on a BLT or diced to decorate a bowl of greens, the tomato is one truly ubiquitous fruit.
But behind the nation’s ruddy tomatoes lurk stories of chemicals, poison, migrant workers and slavery — stories that defy its wholesome image as America’s favorite fruit. In his new book, “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit,” journalist Barry Estabrook investigates these stories to answer the all-important foodie question: Where does this come from?
At the core of Estabrook’s work is the irony of Americans’ palate for tomatoes. As Americans developed a strong taste for tomatoes, their demand for them grew, and to feed their appetite, the summer fruits were grown year round. But the unnatural process of growing seasonal fruit through all twelve months drained tomatoes of their distinctive flavor — leaving American consumers with tasteless fruits that only resemble their ancestors in appearance. Loving their taste led to destroying their taste.
The bland supermarket tomato of today led Estabrook to Florida, the winter-warm state where tomatoes are grown off-season. Although the Floridian environment is perhaps the worst place to raise the fruit naturally, its temperatures and proximity to the populations of the East Coast and the Midwest made the state a logical business choice for industrial tomato growers.
As Estabrook puts it, “Tomato production in the state [of Florida] has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology.”
To compensate for the poor growing environment, Floridian tomato growers use a host of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides, and rely on huge amounts of fuel. Estabrook cites the astounding statistic that in a single year, nearly eight million pounds of insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides were put onto Florida’s tomato crop.
But one of the most shocking revelations in “Tomatoland” is that the fruits are harvested when green and hard — “mature green,” as the industry calls it — not when they are ripe. The underdeveloped fruits can endure long truck rides to far-away grocery stores, but to give off the appearance of ripeness, are sprayed with ethylene gas, which turns their skins red. Despite their deceptive coloring, the tomatoes are still unripe — and taste like it.
In addition to the environmental and gustatory aspects of the American tomato, Estabrook also spends a considerable number of pages on the social and political dimensions of the tomato. Focusing on the now well-known Immokalee workers, Estabrook shines a light on the many injustices perpetrated against farm workers plucking tomatoes from corporate fields.
Dismal living conditions, low and unpredictable pay, no medical benefits, no sick days, violence, and exposure to toxic chemicals plague tomato pickers, most of whom are migrant workers coming from south of the border. Life for tomato pickers is so exploitative that Fort Meyers’ chief assistant U.S. attorney Douglas Molloy called south Florida’s tomato fields “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”
Particularly disturbing is the story Estabrook tells of three women field workers who had been routinely exposed to dangerous amounts of chemicals during pregnancy. The women say they were not warned about the possible effects of such exposure, and each gave birth to babies with extreme defects and deformities. Facing what seemed like insurmountable legal odds, the families sued Ag-Mart, the company that owned the fields, for damages and set off an impressive chain of court cases and community activism demanding the fair treatment of tomato pickers.
Surprisingly, Estabrook says nothing about the tomato’s most popular processed form — ketchup. With 650 million bottles and 11 billion single-serving packets sold around the world each year by Heinz alone, it seems the condiment deserves at least a chapter in a book about tomatoes. And considering the recent politics of ketchup in school cafeterias — its controversial classification as a vegetable serving — a discussion of the sauce would have fit squarely into one of the book’s subtle themes: when does a tomato stop being a tomato?
Nevertheless, readers of “Tomatoland” will never look at a tomato the same way again. Reading this new book, audiences will marvel at their newfound knowledge of the tomato and will have fun doing it. Never technical or tedious, Estabrook finds the rare balance between the informative and the enjoyable — a truly delicious summer read.
For more of Barry Estabrook’s writing, visit his blog at Politics of the Plate.