Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Why the Modern Tomato is Flawed: Inside Tomatoland
Kurt Michael Friese Chef, Author, Advocate
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kurt-friese/why-the-modern-tomato-is_b_868318.html

First let's get one persistent canard out of the way. Yes, the tomato is 
technically a fruit, not a vegetable, but for purposes of economics the USDA 
classifies it as a vegetable, and as such it is the second most popular 
vegetable in the nation after that other burger staple, lettuce. This is 
surprising in only one respect: A vast majority of the tomatoes consumed in 
the U.S. every year ($5 billion worth), are devoid of the flavor and 
nutritive value they once had.

Sure, that plant your neighbor gave you that's just beginning to enjoy the 
summer heat will produce lots of delicious, succulent tomatoes come August or 
September. But in his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture 
Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit, two-time James Beard Award-winning 
journalist Barry Estabrook tells us why the modern factory-farmed tomato in 
most grocery stores is a poster child for nearly everything that is wrong 
with industrial agriculture. A recent USDA study, he points out, says that 
the average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has 
"30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, 
and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But that modern tomato 
does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much 
sodium."

This is because the tomatoes grown in the fields in and around Immokalee, 
Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are 
grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it's not flavor, and 
it's not nutrition. It's shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that 
department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it 
needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays 
a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough 
green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. 
The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder 
unscathed.

That truck was likely headed to one of the many enormous warehouses in the 
area, which "force-ripen" the fruit by smothering them with ethylene gas. 
This process does make them red, but it does not truly ripen them. Thus the 
sugars are nowhere near as developed as the ones in your back yard will be 
and the result is the mealy pink baseballs in your grocer's produce section 
right now.

Our enormous appetite for having pretty much any food available to us at 
anytime of year has led to a system where yes, you can have a tomato in 
February, but the cost is a lot more than the $1.25/lb you're likely to pay 
at your local Wal-Mart. It comes at the cost of enormous environmental damage 
and shocking worker abuse. It utilizes thousands of migrant workers, some of 
whom are undocumented, and many of whom live and work in literal slave 
conditions. And since the muggy lowlands of Florida are not native habitat, a 
tomato plant there can fall victim to as many as 27 separate insect species 
and 29 different diseases, necessitating a plethora of chemicals that are as 
hard on the workers and the land as they are on the pests. Then there's the 
31 different fungicides in use. The list goes on.

Tomatoland is based on Estabrook's James Beard Award-winning 2010 article 
"The Price of Tomatoes," and is an in-depth investigation of what's wrong 
with the modern tomato (and by extension, modern agriculture). It is vital 
information that every conscientious eater-and parents of eaters-ought to 
know. Hopefully, as more people read the book, they will begin to look beyond 
price, and start considering cost.