Tomatoland
Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.
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What Hacker News says
- > Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
Guess where the north got their cotton to make those shoes? The south. The textile industries of the north would've never gotten their start without cheap cotton made possible by slavery.
> As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
Every South American nation that tried to raise itself out of poverty had their government overthrown or their leader assassinated with the help of good ol' USA. Japan/S. Korea/Taiwan industrialized because USA decided they needed strong allies to counter Russia/China. Check out the grand area plans. Africa was colonized, exported millions of their people to slavery, and is continually destabilized by the west (corporations, world bank, IMF, etc) to perpetuate resource extraction.
The poor is kept poor so the rich can get richer. Why is food so plentiful and cheap? Slave labor. Read Tomatoland for a taste. Why are clothes so cheap? People are working for pennies to make those clothes. Why doesn't the iPhone price rise with inflation? There are millions of poor rural Chinese pounding for a chance to work at inhumane conditions for a few dollars a day. You think they make enough to pull their families out of poverty? Nope, it's mostly foreign companies that are reaping the bulk of the profit while continually pressing their costs (labor wages) down.
- There was a book about this: Tomatoland.
It's depressing in the extreme.
- >The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.
No, they don't. And his work is less historical than ideological.
We have lots of historically verified facts to know that modern processed foods are unhealthy and created to maximize profit. From corn syrup everywhere, to things like this:
E.g. http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Dest...
- "Tomatoland", by Barry Estabrook, is an engaging (if depressing) look at how the tomato biz got that way.
- Tangential rant:
The publishing industry pushes more and more cookbooks every year, and between traditional cookbooks and more recent YouTube channels, most recipes are much more fantasy entertainment than serious attempts at trying to get people to take more control over how their food is made.
The problem is that cookbook recipes distort the flow of food preparation:
Find an appealing recipe -> look up the necessary ingredients -> buy the ingredients -> take the ingredients home and make the recipe
This motivates people to purchase ingredients which are not in season, i.e. purchasing tomatoes to make tomato salad when tomatoes are not in season. This generates demand for produce which is lacking in flavor and nutrition, with an outsize environmental impact due to being shipped thousands of miles[1].
The proper flow is to go to a local farmer's market -> buy what is local and in-season (with a side benefit that it will be cheap, since the farmer has little control over the date of harvest and everything has to be sold before it rots) and in great quantities -> figure out how to make it once you get home, taking advantage of other produce which is in season, fresh ingredients which are available all year round (i.e. meat, dairy, eggs), and shelf-stable pantry staples.
This flow yields food which is simultaneously tastier and more affordable - but you have to learn how to cook as an independent life skill, and not constantly rely upon recipes.
[1] See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Des...
- There's a book called "Tomatoland" that discusses the tomato industry and how tomatoes were selected not for taste, but to last through the journey to the supermarket and shelf life once there. Interview with author and excerpt are here: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farmi...
