Tomatoland

Author: Barry Estabrook
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449408419
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that 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 to this point? 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 visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties 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 eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

Tomatoland

Author: Barry Estabrook
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781449489533
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Three-time James Beard Award-winner Barry Estabrook's completely revised third edition of his hard-hitting 2011 exposé, Tomatoland, includes a new foreword by Eric Schlosser and four new chapters with startling updates. Four entirely new chapters take up where the current edition leaves off to tell the story behind what president Bill Clinton calls "the most astonishing thing politically in the world we're living in today." Estabrook reveals how a rag-tag group of migrant tomato pickers in Florida convinced the world's largest restaurant chains and food retailers to join forces to create a model for labor justice, and then took the necessary steps to make sure that the model really works, not only in Florida, but around the world. The book includes a new foreword by journalist and author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation).

Fed Up

Author: Dale Finley Slongwhite
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813047617
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
One farmworker tells of the soil that would “bite” him, but that was the chemicals burning his skin. Others developed lupus, asthma, diabetes, kidney failure, or suffered myriad symptoms with no clear diagnosis. Some miscarried or had children with genetic defects, while others developed cancer. In Fed Up, Dale Slongwhite collects the nearly inconceivable and chilling oral histories of African American farmworkers whose lives, and the lives of their families, were forever altered by one of the most horrific pesticide exposure incidents in United States’ history. For decades, the farms around Lake Apopka, Florida’s third largest lake, were sprayed with chemicals ranging from the now-banned DDT to toxaphene. Among the most productive farmland in America, the fields were doused with organochlorine pesticides, also known as persistent organic pollutants; the once-clear waters of the lake turned pea green; birds, alligators, and fish died at alarming rates; and still the farmworkers planted, harvested, packed, and shipped produce all over the country, enduring scorching sun, snakes, rats, injuries, substandard housing, low wages, and the endocrine disruptors that crop dusters dropped as they toiled. Eventually, state and federal dollars were allocated to buy out and close farms to attempt land restoration, water clean up, and wildlife rehabilitation. But the farmworkers became statistics, nameless casualties history almost forgot. Here are their stories, told in their own words.

Bet the Farm

Author: Frederick Kaufman
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1118234596
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
A prominent food journalist follows the trail from Big Pizza to square tomatoes to exploding food prices to Wall Street, trying figure out why we can't all have healthy, delicious, affordable food In 2008, farmers grew enough to feed twice the world's population, yet more people starved than ever before?and most of them were farmers. In Bet the Farm, food writer Kaufman sets out to discover the connection between the global food system and why the food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as the the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever. To unravel this riddle, he moves down the supply chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing a force at work that is larger than Monsanto, McDonalds or any of the other commonly cited culprits?and far more shocking. Kaufman's recent cover story for Harper's, "The Food Bubble," provoked controversy throughout the food world, and led to appearances on the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now, and Bloomberg TV, along with features on National Public Radio and the BBC World Service. Visits the front lines of the food supply system and food politics as Kaufman visits farms, food science research labs, agribusiness giants, the United Nations, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and more Explains how food has been financialized and the powerful consequences of this change, including: the Arab Spring, started over rising food prices; farmers being put out of business; food scientists rushing to make easy-to-transport, homogenized ingredients instead of delicious foods Explains how the push for sustainability in food production is more likely to make everything worse, rather than better?and how the rise of fast food is bad for us, but catastrophic for those who will never even see a McNugget or frozen pizza

Cuisine and Culture

Author: Linda Civitello
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470403713
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
Cuisine and Culture presents a multicultural and multiethnic approach that draws connections between major historical events and how and why these events affected and defined the culinary traditions of different societies. Witty and engaging, Civitello shows how history has shaped our diet--and how food has affected history. Prehistoric societies are explored all the way to present day issues such as genetically modified foods and the rise of celebrity chefs. Civitello's humorous tone and deep knowledge are the perfect antidote to the usual scholarly and academic treatment of this universally important subject.

The Frog Commissary Cookbook

Author: Steven Poses
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0307826449
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 732

Book Description
Originally published in 1985, The Frog Commissary Cookbook is a bestseller beloved by home cooks. This classic tome culls recipes from The Frog and Commissary restaurants “from everyday favorites like Commissary Carrot Cake and Vegetarian Chili to more eclectic fare like Stir-fried Duck with Chinese Sausage."

Closing the Food Gap

Author: Mark Winne
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807047317
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
This powerful call to arms offers a realistic vision for getting locally produced, healthy food onto everyone’s table, “[blending] a passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor” (Dr. Jane Goodall) In Closing the Food Gap, food activist and journalist Mark Winne poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations around food: What about those people who are not financially able to make conscientious choices about where and how to get food? And in a time of rising rates of both diabetes and obesity, what can we do to make healthier foods available for everyone? To address these questions, Winne tells the story of how America’s food gap has widened since the 1960s, when domestic poverty was “rediscovered,” and how communities have responded with a slew of strategies and methods to narrow the gap, including community gardens, food banks, and farmers’ markets. The story, however, is not only about hunger in the land of plenty and the organized efforts to reduce it; it is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations. With the popularity of Whole Foods and increasingly common community-supported agriculture (CSA), wherein subscribers pay a farm so they can have fresh produce regularly, the demand for fresh food is rising in one population as fast as rates of obesity and diabetes are rising in another. Over the last three decades, Winne has found a way to connect impoverished communities experiencing these health problems with the benefits of CSAs and farmers’ markets; in Closing the Food Gap, he explains how he came to his conclusions. With tragically comic stories from his many years running a model food organization, the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, alongside fascinating profiles of activists and organizations in communities across the country, Winne addresses head-on the struggles to improve food access for all of us, regardless of income level.

Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat

Author: Barry Estabrook
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248038
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
A Splendid Table Staff Book Pick of the Year "Estabrook, a reporter of iron constitution and persistence, has dug deep into the truth about the American pork industry without losing his sense of humor and humanity." —Christopher Kimball, Wall Street Journal In Pig Tales, New York Times best-selling author of Tomatoland Barry Estabrook turns his attention to the dark side of the American pork industry. Drawing on personal experiences raising pigs as well as sharp investigative instincts, Estabrook covers the range of the human-porcine experience. He shows how these intelligent creatures are all too often subjected to lives of suffering in confinement and squalor, sustained on a drug-laced diet just long enough to reach slaughter weight. But Estabrook also reveals how it is possible to raise pigs responsibly and respectfully, benefiting producers and consumers—as well as some of the top chefs in America. Provocative, witty, and deeply informed, Pig Tales is bound to spark conversation at dinner tables across America.

I Am Not a Tractor!

Author: Susan L. Marquis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501714309
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
I Am Not a Tractor! celebrates the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders who have transformed one of the worst agricultural situations in the United States into one of the best. Susan L. Marquis highlights past abuses workers suffered in Florida’s tomato fields: toxic pesticide exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even, astonishingly, modern-day slavery. Marquis unveils how, even without new legislation, regulation, or government participation, these farmworkers have dramatically improved their work conditions. Marquis credits this success to the immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala who formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a neuroscience major who takes great pride in the watermelon crew he runs, a leading farmer/grower who was once homeless, and a retired New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a groundbreaking institution. Through the Fair Food Program that they have developed, fought for, and implemented, these people have changed the lives of more than thirty thousand field workers. I Am Not a Tractor! offers a range of solutions to a problem that is rooted in our nation’s slave history and that is worsened by ongoing conflict over immigration.

Just Eat

Author: Barry Estabrook
Publisher: Lorena Jones Books
ISBN: 0399580271
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of Tomatoland test drives the most popular diets of our time, investigating the diet gurus, contradictory advice, and science behind the programs to reveal how we should—and shouldn’t—be dieting. “Essential reading . . . This will completely change your ideas about what you should be eating.”—Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums Investigative journalist Barry Estabrook was often on the receiving end of his doctor’s scowl. Realizing he had two options—take more medication or lose weight—Estabrook chose the latter, but was paralyzed by the options. Which diet would keep the weight off? What program could he maintain over time? What diet works best—or even at all? Over the course of three years, Estabrook tried the regimens behind the most popular diets of the past forty years—from paleo, keto, gluten-free, and veganism to the Master Cleanse, Whole30, Atkins, Weight Watchers—examining the people, claims, and science behind the fads, all while recording his mental and physical experience of following each one. Along the way, he discovered that all the branded programs are derived from just three diets. There are effective, scientifically valid takeaways to be cherry-picked . . . and the rest is just marketing. Perhaps most alarming, Estabrook uncovered how short-term weight loss can do long-term health damage that may go undetected for years. Estabrook contextualizes his reporting with an analysis of our culture’s bizarre dieting history, dating back to the late 1800s, to create a thorough—and thoroughly entertaining—look at what specific diets do to our bodies, why some are more effective than others, and why our relationship with food is so fraught. Estabrook’s account is a relatable, pragmatic look into the ways we try to improve our health through dieting, revealing the answer may be to just eat.