Tomatoland:
How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
by Barry EstabrookNot recommended if you ever plan to buy a grocery story tomato again. Actually, no--highly recommended in that case. Not recommended if you're of limited means and can't afford to buy at farmer's markets.
I'm not sure that organic is a viable alternative. The ones I've purchased don't taste any better than the regular. Are they also picked green and pinked up with Ethylene gas?
It's so hard to believe that the kind of land and human abuse practiced by Florida tomato growers could be profitable. If they--and we--were forced to pay for cleanup of the harm they do, it couldn't be. Of course if such laws were enacted, they'd probably have about the same effect as the ones about coal strip mining--companies don't necessarily clean up the land when they're done, just to promise to clean it up someday.
Now that I come to think of it, almost all the tomatoes I see in the grocery these days come from South America. I'm not naive enough to think that our government is free of corruption, but I wouldn't even venture to guess about those. How many Mexican farmers pay off the local officials to ignore the labor abuses suffered by their workers? On the other hand, it's a lot harder to overwork, abuse, and underpay people who are actual citizens of the country--they'll just run away. Why the heck doesn't the US have a decent guest worker program?
Sorry, I'm off topic. The best part of the book is the last two chapters, which describe people who set up free daycare and early childhood education for farm workers; a farmer who decided to do his job the right way; a lawyer who organized farm labor into effective unions. And last, most encouranging but probably least significant, a stubborn man who started growing heirloom tomatoes for their taste, not their appearance. Once people sunk their teeth into his tomatoes, they never went back to insipid, mealy and acidic.
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