Jan 2023 Book Club, "Tomatoland" by Barry Estabrook
Tue, Jan 10
|Online event on Zoom
"Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit" reads like a suspenseful whodunit and is “at its most potent and scathing in its portrayal of South Florida’s tomato growers and their tactics over the past half-century” (The New York Times).


Time & Location
Jan 10, 2023, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Online event on Zoom
Guests
About the Event
In Tomatoland, investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. He 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…