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 in his new book: "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit."
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 fourteen times more sodium.
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 is explored in the book?
