Barry Estabrook

First, the takeaway: "You should lead a diet, not follow one."

The author is a former editor of Eating Well magazine and a Vermonter (yay). He goes on the Ornish diet, the South Beach diet, the Mediterranean diet, Weight Watchers, and some others. No, not all at the same time, a la Bridget Jones! He eventually does lose and keep off some weight. Here's what he concludes:

"I will never go on [a diet] again."

But seriously, the reason is: "You should lead a diet, not follow one. What you eat and show more how you do so are deeply personal activities, right up there with sex. They're nobody's damn business... For me, successful weight loss began when I examined what I ate and how I ate it, then started making changes..."

I will always have a place in my heart for WW; and while doing a post-mortem at book's end, Estabrook concludes: "Although I dropped out of Weight Watchers after a couple of months, the point-tracking app... made it abundantly clear that I would never lose weight unless I cut way back on how much cheese I snacked on." WW left me also with life-altering insights and habits. Now I munch on apples & carrots every single day; and for me, it wasn't cheese, but french fries and pie crust I learned were unsafe in any dose. "The point is," he continues, "there are useful weight-loss tips between the covers of diet books," or in a point-tracking app. show less

“An acre of Florida tomatoes gets hit with five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as an acre of California tomatoes.”

The factory farming of tomatoes in Florida is quite a horror story. Fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides, low wages, servitude, birth defects. It’s all there in what is truly a race to the bottom. Agribusiness has really screwed up the tomato.

I never realized that the lack of taste in those off-season tomatoes from Florida was more or less deliberate. show more It’s not how the tomatoes taste that’s important, it’s about how they look on the grocery shelf after transport and so taste is no longer factored into the tomato gene pool. In fact, good tasting tomatoes that might be misshapen or bruised or in other ways not esthetically pleasing are not even shipped. Yield, size and appearance are all that matters. And people just keep buying them. There’s a lot of pain and suffering involved in getting a terrible tasting product on the grocery store shelves. I rarely buy winter tomatoes but that will now be never. I don’t want them on my restaurant salads, either.

The book ends on an optimistic note, though. Labor attorneys and farm worker advocates have helped to make some of the workers lives more livable. Smaller niche farmers on the east coast are able support their farms by supplying high-end restaurants and farmers markets with quality tomatoes.

This was an engaging, eye-opening read and good for anyone with an interest in learning where their food comes from. show less

I do have an unhealthy passion for tomatoes. I'm not sure when, where or how it started. I can recall a summer in college, growing tomatoes by the side of the house - standing in the cherry tomato patch eating warm sweet flavorful handfuls of tomatoes. I believe I ended up getting chapped lips that summer from eating way too many tomato sandwiches too.

Gardening is really only fun to me because of the tomatoes - I do love growing the endless varieties of peppers and having an abundance of show more squash - but tomatoes were always it for me. And those who know me know I LOVE the German Johnson tomato - I think it's the perfect tomato. It might not be perfect for salads, it might not be perfect for salsa, it might not be perfect for grilled burgers - but it's perfect for me.

This book got four point five out of five stars because German Johnson's were not mentioned once.

In all seriousness, this is a must read if you are conscious about what your purchases support. You vote every time you purchase something and the only way to seriously have a clear mind about your lifestyle is to be comfortable in the knowledge (or ignorance) of what you are supporting every time you spend your money. show less

According to Tomatoland, when it comes to modern-day slavery in America, the supermarket Florida tomato is the new Georgia cotton. Superior taste aside, Estabrook details many other little/unknown reasons you should grow your own lumpy heirlooms instead of opting for the perfect-looking red globes at the grocery store chains and refuse to order them in restaurants all winter long. Very interesting and exceptionally horrifying, especially the chapters detailing unreported birth defect disease show more clusters resulting from repeated agrichemical exposure. Socially and economically relevant--highly recommended for anyone involved in horticulture, food science, agribusiness, social work, occupational safety, or environmental and labor law. show less