Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook: Book Review

In its opening chapters, Barry Estabrooks' Tomatoland seems to be following the same road as Arthur Allen's wonderful Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato. Specifically, this road is a bumpy track across the Atacama Desert, where an intrepid group of food adventurers are pursuing a fabled Lost Tomato of Peru (AKA Solanum pimpinellifolium, a genetically important wild tomato variety).

But no sooner have we become engaged in this quest for tomato breeders' gold than Estabrook jumps the track and, instead of keeping up with these horticultural Indiana Joneses, carries us away to even more gripping and dangerous territory: the evil empire of Big Tomato, where the innocent are enslaved, beaten, imprisoned and even murdered for trying to escape from the appalling press gangs of Florida's tomato fields.

He crafts thrilling true-crime documentary from court transcripts as he tells of daring infiltrators who engineer midnight escapes, and brilliant legal battles reminiscent of Erin Brockovich or Silkwood that centre on the efforts to establish an evidentiary connection between tomato pesticides and three tomato pickers' children born without arms or legs in one small area within a few months of one another.

In case you're now about to give up tomatoes forever, know that Tomatoland also documents the brave and dedicated crusaders who are trying to reform the commercial tomato industry and increase the potential for small-scale and organic tomato production... not to mention the ones who are trying to make sure every tomato sold in a North American grocery store is a tasty one.

Tomatoland, How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by former Gourmet magazine contributing editor Barry Estabrook (Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC, 2011) is the most exciting and inspiring food book I've read for years. If you haven't already done so, this is the book that will make you swear off grey, cardboard winter tomatoes for good.