Download Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit AudioBook Free
Supermarket produce parts bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, excellent red-orange tomatoes have become basically a countrywide birthright. However in Tomatoland, which is based on his Adam Beard Award-winning article, The Price of Tomatoes, investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge individuals and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with an increase of than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are chosen hard and inexperienced and artificially gassed until their skins get a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled produces, but in addition has produced fruits with considerably reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin supplements A, and vitamin supplements C, and tomatoes which may 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 up to now? 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 trips the laboratories of seedsmen attempting to develop kinds 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 finally to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the country's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland Estabrook presents a who's who cast of heroes in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate expands one from every eight tomatoes consumed in the United States; the ex-Marine who minds the group that dictates the scale, color, and form of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who may have doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past 10 years; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to make money for his parents' medical charges and found himself enslaved for just two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well epos of today's agribusiness systems and the purchase price we pay as a contemporary society when we take flavor and considered of our food purchases.
