Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
By Barry Estabrook; Kansas City (MO); Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 2011.
Reviewed by Rick Burnette
During the summer of 2011, I heard an NPR interview of Barry Estabrook about his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. The food writer described having observed three green spheres fall from a loaded farm truck near Naples, Florida, which then bounced off the pavement. Upon further inspection, he discovered essentially undamaged, unripened tomatoes.
Intrigued, Estabrook began to investigate tomato production in southwest Florida where two-thirds of America’s wintertime tomatoes are produced. He learned not only why a tomato can survive a 10-foot fall from a speeding truck, but also uncovered a deeply entrenched system of farmworker exploitation that has been propped up by consumer demand and corporate interests. In Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a long list of stakeholders in the tomato industry, including plant breeders and the powerful Florida Tomato Committee which sets the standards for the commercial crop. In this book, we meet trafficked Mexican and Guatemalan harvesters as well as a Pennsylvania farmer who grows and sells heirlooms to New York City chefs who know how tomatoes should look and taste.
We’re also introduced to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a human rights organization that was organized in the late 1990s to address farmworker abuses including inadequate pay, intolerable working conditions, human trafficking and sexual violence.
When Tomatoland was published, CIW had, for years, been focusing its energies on persuading tomato growers to improve worker wages that had eroded over previous decades. Despite initial refusals to comply with farmworker demands, the growers were eventually compelled to increase their per-bucket compensation following CIW-led hunger strikes with additional pressure from clergymen. However, the raise was inadequate to lift workers out of poverty and the farm owners were still unwilling to provide a fair wage.
CIW then took the workers’ case to some of the biggest customers of Florida’s tomato industry—fast food corporations. Launching the Campaign for Fair Food, CIW’s strategy was to press companies to guarantee farmworkers their basic rights and increase payment by a mere penny per pound for the tomatoes harvested. As Estabrook describes, “A penny per pound would be a pittance to a fast food behemoth like McDonald’s, which has annual revenues of over $22 billion. But when you are picking a ton of tomatoes a day, as a worker typically does, that’s a raise from $50 dollars a day to $70, the difference between below-poverty existence and a livable, if paltry, wage.”
Met with resistance, CIW then led a boycott against Taco Bell in alliance with faith, community and student organizations. In 2005, the coalition eventually succeeded in persuading the shareholders and executives of Yum! (Taco Bell’s parent company) to engage. McDonalds and Burger King followed suit over the next three years and, by 2010, several other major food service companies had joined. After Tomatoland was published, Walmart also signed a Fair Food Agreement with CIW in 2014. Presently, Publix and Wendy’s refuse to participate in the Fair Food Program.
Farmworker abuses described by Tomatoland are not limited to southwest Florida. Such violations are found wherever migrants do the work that locals are unwilling or unable to do, whether in North Carolina Christmas tree farms or in California’s Central Valley. I encountered similar plights suffered by migrant workers along the Thai-Burma border where I lived for almost two decades.
In 2013, my family moved to southwest Florida, eventually engaging with an Immokalee farmworker-focused ministry. Despite CIW’s achievements, the poverty rate of this agricultural town is 43.9% and locals are subjected to overpriced food and housing. Additionally, current anxieties related to the legal status of migrant workers has resulted in many residents avoiding particular locations, including schools and grocery stores, for fear of being arrested and deported.
Seven years ago, Estabrook was struck by the irony that “workers who pick the food we eat cannot afford to feed themselves.” Unfortunately, for many of Immokalee’s farmworkers, this sad fact remains.
A revised third edition of Tomatoland, including four new chapters, is slated for release by Andrews McMeel Publishing in April, 2018. I recommend all justice lovers read it.
Rick Burnette served as an agricultural missionary with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Thailand from 1994 through 2009. Afterward he worked with ECHO, Inc. in Thailand and Florida. He and his wife Ellen currently codirect Cultivate Abundance (www.cultivateabundance.org), a ministry focused on alleviating farmworker food insecurity through small-scale food production in Immokalee and elsewhere.
