Three Summer Reads — That Aren’t Your Usual Cookbooks
“TomatoLand”
If you’ve ever eaten a tomato, “Tomatoland” (Andrews McMeel), is an absolute must-read.
What Eric Schlosser’s book, “Fast Food Nation” (Harper Perennial), did to unveil the dark side of the cheap, drive-through burgers Americans can’t get enough of, James Beard Award-winning writer Barry Estabrook does the same to modern industrial agribusiness that has reaped the profits from creating tomatoes that are tasteless, less nutritious, 14 times higher in sodium, and inexplicably available year-round in supermarkets nationwide.
You’ll learn that Florida may grow one-third of all tomatoes in the United States, yet its climate is highly unsuitable for that crop. Its sandy soil possesses little nutrients, requiring the need for chemical fertilizers. Its humid, torrid temperatures foster fungal diseases and insects, necessitating hundreds of herbicides and pesticides. And the largely Hispanic migrants who pick the tomatoes work in dangerous conditions, and in some cases, treated little better than modern-day slaves.
Estabrook first popped the lid on the horrendous conditions some tomato pickers face in an investigative piece he wrote two years ago when he was a former contributing editor to Gourmet magazine.
