Book of the week: Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

(Andrews McMeel, $20)

The grocery-store winter tomato might be the perfect embodiment of “everything that is wrong with industrial agriculture,” said Jane Black in The Washington Post. In Florida, where most of America’s winter tomatoes are produced, the soil and climate are almost singularly unsuited for growing them, requiring “tons” of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides that would be unnecessary elsewhere. Conditions for workers are not just bad: Many immigrant pickers are forced to work as slaves by unscrupulous growers. And for all this, the rewards are hard, “tasteless” tomatoes. Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland now arrives as an indictment of the whole system, said Corby Kummer in TheAtlantic.com. But it’s the author’s “way with narrative” that will keep you reading, whether he’s tracing the tomato’s history back to the foothills of the Andes or tagging along with the activists working to give the pickers a better life.

Estabrook “brings a foodie’s passion” to the entire project, said Colette Bancroft in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times. We feel the astonishment of the former Gourmet editor when he first sees a few bright, green tomatoes fall from a speeding truck, then bounce and roll to a stop without suffering so much as a bruise. We learn with him that Florida became a top tomato producer when it was discovered in the 1930s that the state’s winter yield could be picked green and then reddened by ethylene gas (as it still is today). The investigative reporter in Estabrook digs deep into the effects of chemical exposure on the workers and their offspring, creating “a picture of their lives that will break all but the most shrunken heart.”

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Tomatoland isn’t as clever about providing solutions, even though it ends with some optimistic notes, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The author’s obvious “fondness for a preindustrial version of American agriculture” isn’t explanation enough as to how small, organic farms might begin to “feed the world’s hungry hordes.” But Estabrook’s survey of the tomato’s past, present, and future contains a “delectable” blend of “sweetness and acid.” This book might not be “as philosophically rich as Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma” or as “adrenalized and slashing as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.” But it belongs in the company of those recent classics of food journalism. It “simmers like a big, bright kettle of heirloom tomato sauce.”