|
|
 If you tally up all the plastic things you come in contact with throughout the day, the list would be quite long — ranging from plastic shampoo bottles, pens, credit cards and Tupperware to your computer keyboard, car parts and some types of fabric. When author Susan Freinkel did just that, she counted 196 unique items, and then became determined to figure out — what exactly is this stuff that has taken over our lives?
In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, Freinkel looks at seven everyday plastic items — a comb, chair, Frisbee, IV bag, lighter, shopping bag and water bottle — as a window into the rise of plastic and the country’s transformation into what she calls “Plasticville.”
The rise of plastics began in the early 20th century, when scientists started developing man-made materials that would not be subject to the scarcity and rigid physical properties of natural resources. And plastic fit the bill — it was pliable, durable, lightweight but strong, and could be easily manipulated into a variety of textures, shapes and colors.
The growth of plastic also came alongside the rise of the petrochemical industry. Oil companies, determined to push their profits higher and higher, figured out that even the ethylene waste from crude oil and natural gas processing could be lucrative — as a raw material for polymers, the building blocks of plastic.
By the end of World War II, plastic had moved out of science labs and into the marketplace. Cheap goods made of plastic meant everyone could afford the items that were once reserved for the rich — “Plastic promised material utopia, available to all,” Freinkel writes.
“In an astonishingly brief period, plastic had become the skeleton, the connective tissue, and the slippery skin of modern life,” Freinkel continues. While plastic offers many conveniences, its ubiquity has not been without consequence. In her chapter on IV bags, she shows that plastic has not only permeated our environment, but our bodies, too. As many have noted, “humans are just a little plastic now” — even newborns carry traces of synthetic materials, everything “such as fire retardants, stain repellants, solvents, metals, waterproofing agents, and bactericides.”
While plastic has certainly harmed humans in many ways — the toxins we’ve absorbed, and the abuse of workers manufacturing our plastic products — Freinkel’s most powerful chapter chronicles plastic’s environmental devastation.
In 1997, Charles Moore was sailing from Hawaii back to California, and in an area known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre, he saw an enormous amount of trash floating in the waters, trapped between the currents. For a week at sea, he saw plastic everywhere he looked. Scientists later estimated that this area, called the Pacific garbage patch, has three million pounds of debris covering an area the size of Texas.
“The very qualities that make many plastics such fantastic materials for the human world — lightness, strength, durability — make them a disaster when they get loose in the natural world,” Freinkel writes.
Although many have tried, cleaning up the Pacific garbage patch would be nearly impossible. Much of the plastic has disintegrated into tiny bits, like “plastic confetti,” making its extraction no easy task. Moreover, scooping out these plastic particles would also remove tiny organisms, such as plankton, that are an essential link in the ocean’s food chain.
The plastic marine refuse that has not broken down into flakes has had another — perhaps more — heartbreaking effect. Laysan albatrosses, sea birds that live near the Pacific garbage patch, are gobbling up plastic bottle caps, pens, lighters and other items, mistaking them for food. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, baby albatrosses that have ingested plastic are more likely to die from starvation or dehydration — while many others die when scraps of plastic puncture their insides or cause suffocation.
“I’ve looked at photos of dozens of dead Laysan albatrosses — pictures that capture in the starkest way the threat plastics pose to the natural world,” Freinkel writes. “Every carcass seems a mockery of the natural order: a crumbling bird-shaped basket of bleached bones and features filled with a mound of gaily colored lighters and straws and bottle caps. The birds are dissolving back into the ground; the plastics promise to endure for centuries.”
While her book offers a clear warning against the plastic-ization of our lives, Freinkel remains even-handed, making sure to point out the numerous benefits of plastic. As she explains in her chapter on the comb, plastic has replaced many natural materials, such as ivory, tortoise shell and coral, that people had been using to make everyday items. Plastic meant people no longer needed to kill animals for raw materials.
Plastic has also led to many critical medical advances — collecting, separating and storing blood for transfusions is only possible because of plastic bags and tubing. And although plastic bags have become the ire of many environmentalists, Freinkel says that in many respects, paper bags pose a greater burden on the environment.
Nevertheless, Freinkel’s concern is clear. “Today, for better and for worse, we are firmly in the plastics age and facing frightening intimations of ecological collapse,” she writes. “Will archaeologists millennia from now scrape down to the stratum of our time and find it simply stuffed with immortal throwaways like bottle caps, bags, wrappers, straws and lighters — evidence of a civilization that choked itself to death on trash?”
 Loading ...
 Nothing ever happens in Susquehanna County. Tucked away in the northeast corner of Appalachian Pennsylvania, these rural lands are one of the last refuges from the strip malls of creeping suburban sprawl, where most of its residents are poor dairy farmers whose families have lived there for generations. But all that changed with the discovery of natural gas.
In “The End of Country,” Pennsylvania-native Seamus McGraw beautifully chronicles the changes natural gas has brought to his hometown and to his own family. Unlike Josh Fox’s 2010 award-winning documentary Gasland, whose famous scenes of water faucets going up in flames became a scathing indictment against hydraulic fracturing (fracking), “The End of Country” does not rely on the sensational. Instead, McGraw’s artfully written work is less activist and more personal, serving somewhat as a prologue to “Gasland”, by capturing the strange events leading up to widespread fracking, the rhythms of daily life in the area, and colorful characters along the way.
Pennsylvania residents have long known about the mysterious natural gas in their back yards because it would sometimes seep to the surface, causing a creek to bubble up unexpectedly, or sparking a small fire out of nowhere. As a kid, McGraw would play in the woods, and as one friend told him, there were spots “where the rocks would sometimes give off a peculiar fume, and if you breathed it deeply enough, it was kind of like getting high.”
Natural gas was first used as a source of energy back in 1825, when a local gunsmith named William Hart constructed a rudimentary pipe system made of hollowed-out logs that brought enough natural gas to light a few homes and shops in his town. But natural gas never really caught on then — it was too hard to transport to big cities, and coal and oil soon came to dominate the energy market.
On top of this, natural gas was unreliable and potentially dangerous. In 1940, a team from the Empire Gas and Fuel Company was drilling for oil in New York — just across the border from Pennsylvania —and instead hit a pocket of gas. The ground shook, a massive cloud of gas and salt water burst into the sky, and the vapors descended onto a one-mile radius below. Residents fled, knowing that a single errant spark could set an entire town ablaze. Later estimates say nearly 60 million cubic feet of gas had gushed out of the earth.
But with the panic of energy crises in the later part of the 20th century, Americans realized the real cost of their foreign oil dependence, and began searching for alternatives. The now-infamous energy company Halliburton pioneered new technology to release natural gas (or oil) from underneath deep layers of rock. In a prototype of hydraulic fracturing, Halliburton pumped nitrogen foam into crevices of rock, which would expand in order to shatter the shale and release the gas. In 1997, a Texas company perfected the process by replacing water with the foam — which would use less energy — and combining it with an offshore drilling technique called directional drilling, in which an army of motorized drill bits radiate horizontally from a single conventional well drilled straight down from the surface. And with that, natural gas drilling was underway.
But even then, natural gas wasn’t big money. Energy companies offered Pennsylvania residents around $5 an acre to explore their land — in some cases it would go as high as $20. For many residents, like Rosemarie Greenwood, who made just $11.40 for every hundred pounds of milk she sold, renting the land, even at such a low price, was a no-brainer — and a stroke of good luck.
For others, the reasons were more complicated. Victoria Switzer, a schoolteacher and dedicated environmental activist, was lured by the promise of clean energy. “Back then, the big picture included a lot of talk about the comparative advantages of natural gas over ozone-munching coal and dirty and dangerous foreign oil,” McGraw writes. “The promise then was all about how we could someday power our cars with compressed natural gas or liquefied natural gas.” And others simply felt like they could not resist the march of progress, the inevitability of the natural gas takeover.
It wasn’t until 2008, when Penn State geologist Terry Engelder calculated that 50 trillion cubic feet of gas were buried in the Marcellus. a type of sedimentary rock found in eastern North America and extends throughout much of the Appalachian Basin, that things really got underway. Leases jumped to thousands of dollars per acre — McGraw’s own mother was offered $2,500 for each acre in her 100-acre farm, plus 15 percent royalties on whatever gas was extracted.
Most commentaries on fracking have focused on the environmental effects of this kind of drilling — the drying up of local water sources, polluted wells, toxic chemicals seeping into the ground water, and of course, flammable drinking water — but McGraw succeeds in showing the intangible consequences to people, too. The quick influx of cash and media attention rattled people, and the tremendous discrepancy in lease prices led to bad feelings and distrust among neighbors. Without much oversight to the natural gas companies, residents spent their days watching the strangers in their backyards. And the constant, cacophonous noise meant what people loved most — being with their land — was now impossible.
Although “The End of Country” moves slowly at times, McGraw’s elegant storytelling is sure to move readers. Because as one woman tells him, this isn’t just about one rural town: “This may be the end of country.”
Loading ...
 Food, Health and Hope: This is the way the agricultural and biotechnology company Monsanto would like you to think of them. But French journalist Marie-Monique Robin has a different slogan in mind: Pollution, Corruption and Control. In her devastating new book, The World According to Monsanto, Robin chronicles the damage to the environment and human welfare the ”world’s most controversial company” has done over the past six decades. And it’s not a pretty sight.
Robin’s stance on Monsanto is clear from the opening pages. ”The arrogance revealed by some company representatives in the trial transcript is truly chilling,” she writes of a court case involving Monsanto’s pollution of Anniston, Alabama in the 1960s. Similar language peppers Robin’s work, giving her book a harsh tone of anger and judgment.
But the history of the infamous company explains why she writes this way. Founded in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri, Monsanto began as a chemical company that produced saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, for the Coca-Cola Company. As it acquired other chemical companies, it shifted toward industrial products such as rubber, plastics and other synthetic materials.
In 1944, Monsanto manufactured the insecticide DDT for the U.S. government to eliminate the typhus and malaria-carrying mosquitoes that were killing American troops in Western Europe. (Decades later, of course, the adverse environmental and health effects of DDT were exposed, and the product was banned in the United States in 1972.) During the war Monsanto scientists were also involved in the Manhattan Project, commissioned by the Pentagon to develop the world’s first nuclear bomb, which decimated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the war in Vietnam erupted, Monsanto once again made huge profits from war by continuing its collaboration with the Pentagon—this time to produce Agent Orange. The U.S. military poured millions of gallons of the herbicide over Vietnam to defoliate the land, which would deprive the guerillas of food and cover. The effects on Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers—who were never told the dangers of the toxic chemical—have been heartbreaking: cancer, stillbirths and dramatic birth defects.
Through this history, Robin shows clearly the original intent of the chemicals now used in industrial farming. As she writes: ”This is proof, if any were needed, that industrial agriculture never would have seen the light of day without close cooperation between the military and scientific establishments, whose respective goals are not exactly to produce healthy food that respects the environment.”
Meanwhile, Monsanto was also wreaking havoc back home by polluting many of the small towns it operated in with dangerous dioxins and PCBs. The company had also developed a synthetic hormone that made it possible to milk cows beyond their natural lactation cycle, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBGH, setting the stage for what Monsanto is best-known for today: genetically modified organisms.
In 1993, the company finalized its Roundup Ready soybean, a genetically modified soybean resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Soon, it had engineered other genetically modified vegetables with qualities—such as a slow ripening process to ensure longer shelf life—that made them easier to sell. Here, it’s not just Monsanto’s product that outrages Robin—it’s the way the company has bullied everyone around it to get ahead.
For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shockingly decided that GMOs wouldn’t be regulated or labeled since they are ”substantially similar to substances commonly found in foods.” This decision, as Robin shows, was more political than scientific; in the case of Monsanto’s genetically modified tomatoes, it flew in the face of research showing the fruit may have caused stomach lesions in rats. The reason she suggests is the infiltration of the regulatory body—the FDA’s Michael Taylor, for example, was once a Monsanto lawyer and was now in charge of regulating his former client’s products.
After pushing its products on the market, Monsanto achieved another stunning victory: patenting life. U.S. patent law from 1951 clearly states that living organisms are excluded from the patent process, but in 1983, the Supreme Court reversed this, and in 2001, ruled that transgenic seeds could also be patented. Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto attorney, wrote the opinion on this decision.
What followed is well-known: Monsanto launched an aggressive legal campaign against any farmer found growing patented products without permission, even though many of these seeds grew because wind, insects or animals carried them into a farmer’s field unknowing—not intellectual property theft. As Robin chronicles, the company is leaving farmers in the United States and across the world in ruins, particularly in India, where rates of farmer suicide (usually by swallowing Monsanto pesticides) are staggering.
Robin packs an enormous amount of information into her thick book, but at times it’s confusing, poorly organized and too dense to get through. Her tendency to use long quotes shows the primary sources she grappled with, but ultimately it’s tiring, and readers will quickly realize her 329-page work could have easily been 200. Despite the book’s difficulty, Robin’s remains an important one. Monsanto is shaping the future of our food system and our environment, and we must understand how. Not everyone is convinced of the harms of GMOs, but Robin’s thorough history of Monsanto points to perhaps the most persuasive argument of all: With such a terrible track record, what are the odds they got it right this time?
Loading ...
 Americans go through about 80 million tons of paper each year — paper used for books, newspapers, catalogues, paper towels, packaging and copy paper. While paper is one of the most common household items, few of us know anything about its lifecycle: how many trees are needed to make it, where those trees come from, what chemicals are used in making paper, how much gasoline is used to ship it and how much of it ends up in our landfills.
The unseen costs of our everyday Stuff — and our obsession with it — is the subject of veteran environmental activist Annie Leonard’s brilliant book, The Story of Stuff, which traces our most precious belongings from their extraction from the earth as natural resources, to their inevitable landfill graves.
Leonard, who has an insatiable curiosity for trash, takes readers on a gripping around-the-world tour of forests, coalmines, factories, sweatshops, big box stores, landfills and even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to piece together the complicated story of our belongings — one that will surely never let readers look at a cup of coffee or a cotton t-shirt the same way again.
A cotton t-shirt, for instance, may cost about $4.99 at Wal-Mart. But growing enough cotton for this one t-shirt requires 256 gallons of water. Cotton farms also use 10 percent of the world’s fertilizers and 25 percent of insecticides, many of which cause neurological and vision disorders in field workers. Giant machines turn the raw cotton into fabric and suck up huge amounts of energy in the process, and then toxic chemicals like chlorine and formaldehyde are added to the fabric for coloring and wrinkle-resistance.
The fabric is sewn into t-shirts in sweatshops in poor countries where employees work in abysmal conditions for little pay and with virtually no rights. The growing and manufacturing required for one t-shirt produces five pounds of carbon dioxide. Additional resources are then used to ship it across the world to a suburban Wal-Mart. After it is bought, the packaging, and inevitably, the t-shirt too, are thrown away and wind up in a landfill that pollutes soil and water, or in an incinerator that releases toxic chemicals into the air.
 Author, Annie Leonard At each step of way, Leonard points to the imperialistic nature of America’s material economy — its extraction and use of precious resources from poor countries, its pollution of other people’s communities, its reliance on cheap foreign labor, its influence on international trade and tax laws to favor itself, and perhaps most egregiously of all, its dumping of trash on poor nations’ shores. “What is more symbolic than the richest country in the hemisphere dumping its waste on the poorest and then turning a deaf ear to all pleas for help?” she writes of America’s trashing of Haiti. The true cost of our Stuff — costs to the environment, to others and to ourselves — is quietly hidden from the price tag at the store, Leonard argues.
Leonard is clear that consuming in itself is not the problem — everyone needs a certain amount of food, water, clothing, medicine and shelter to survive. The problems are consumerism — people using shopping to “meet our emotional and social needs” and to “define and demonstrate our self-worth” — and overconsumption — “when we take far more resources than we need and than the planet can sustain.”
And this is where Americans find themselves today. Each American creates 4.6 pounds of trash per day, which comes to 254 million tons overall for the entire year. And household waste represents only two-and-a-half percent of our national trash — according to the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. companies generate 7.6 billion tons of waste each year! If the entire world consumed at American rates, we would need 5.4 earths to sustain the human race.
 But the ultimate cost of our Stuff, Leonard argues, is our happiness. Despite the unprecedented amounts of Stuff Americans now have, the United States scores lower on many indices of well-being, and as one study shows, after meeting our basic material needs, having more Stuff actually incrementally decreases our happiness! Americans are caught on what Leonard calls the “work-watch-spend treadmill: exhausting ourselves at work, then decompressing in front of the TV, which blares commercials telling us we need to go shopping, which we do, only to find we need to work even harder to pay for it all, and so the cycle continues.”
As an activist, Leonard offers plenty of solutions for change — none of them easy. Arguing against convenient answers like buying “green” products and recycling, Leonard pushes for an entire shift in the way we think about Stuff. Buy less of it, keep it longer, fix things instead of immediately replacing them, share, compost what you can and value time and relationships over things. Leonard also offers a host of societal remedies, tools for getting involved and helpful resources for digging deeper into where our own Stuff comes from.
The Story of Stuff is beautifully written and meticulously researched, but most importantly, is pitch-perfect — it’s motivating without ever being preachy or condescending. Leonard teaches readers how to think about Stuff beyond the store’s price tag, and ultimately, how to imagine an alternative story of Stuff in which possessions neither rule our lives nor cause so much harm.
Loading ...
Published by Chelsea Green
 When Didi Emmons stepped onto Eva Sommaripa’s Massachusetts farm, she knew she had set foot in paradise. The Boston-based chef found more than 200 types of unusual herbs, greens and edible weeds — a bounty that would revolutionize her cooking. But on top of these fresh ingredients, Emmons also discovered a more sustainable way of life that starkly contrasted with the city living she was accustomed to.
In her most recent book, Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm, Emmons shares the culinary and environmental practices she learned from Sommaripa over the past ten years. While billed as a cookbook — Wild Flavors boasts 150 tasty recipes, such as rhubarb-raisin chutney, four-allium risotto with sea scallops, roasted parsnip soup and cod potato leek gratin — Emmons’ work is much more than that. It also showcases many of the exotic plants growing on the farm, offers tips on how to reduce waste, compost and recycle, and recounts stories of the friends and community who give life to Sommaripa’s garden.
In Emmons’ portrayal, Sommaripa is a quirky but principled food lover who abhors the excesses of consumer culture. Sommaripa hasn’t visited a grocery store in decades, stocks her kitchen with used restaurant equipment, has only two cereal box-sized trashcans in her house, and even saves twisty ties to avoid creating unnecessary waste.
So in keeping with Sommaripa’s spirit, the avoidance of waste — particularly from food — becomes a recurring theme throughout Wild Flavors. “At industrial farms, the seeds, flowers, roots, buds, and stems of vegetables and leafy greens are left by the wayside,” Emmons writes. “Eva teaches us to not be afraid to try eating a plant in a new way, and to use every part of the plant.”
Sommaripa eats plants alongside their growing cycle to maximize their utility. For instance, in late summer she uses chive flowers as seasoning; in early fall the plant’s berries are added to sauces and mashed potatoes; later, seeds from the dry berries become another form of seasoning; and in late fall, she harvests the fleshy onion greens that are found in grocery stores.
“When you grow food, you realize how much work it is, how much energy and resources go into it,” Sommaripa remarked. “If you don’t grow food, you have no concept.”
 Author, Didi Emmons Emmons also recounts being shocked to see Sommaripa eating an apple — the entire apple, core, seeds and all. But this moment showed Emmons how much food she was throwing away everyday. “I am opening up to parts of plants that I previously considered inedible,” she writes. “The stem end of the carrot, the stump of a lettuce, the rind on some cheese, the core of cabbage or fennel, the stems of kale or collards, bruised fruit, aging veggies, orange rinds, sweet potato skins, asparagus ends, and so on…”
Emmons incorporates this philosophy into her recipes, so alongside instructions for wild rice, arugula leaves, and parsley salad, she also explains that arugula flowers are a “handsome and righteous-tasting flower that can be “scatter[ed] on salads, soups, and other savory foods.”
The recipes are also organized seasonally to encourage fresh and local eating, and to preface each recipe, Emmons details how to avoid spoilage through proper storage and preservation of the plants featured in her dishes: herbs can be dried or made into delicious butters; arugula should not be washed before storage; beets can be buried outside through the winter; and autumn olives should be refrigerated on the branch.
But Sommaripa can even find a use for food that has gone bad, Emmons explains. When autumn comes, she collects bruised and rotten tomatoes that have fallen off the vine and extracts tomato water, a sweet clear juice inside the fruit, that can be added to soups or stews.
In the end, this cookbook is more about cultivating a certain way of looking at food than it is about specific recipes. Emmons skillfully conveys the beauty of the plants she cooks — and ultimately, her love for them — leaving the reader with her same admiration for produce. “Cilantro acts like the tambourine in a band, giving a dish some much-needed pep and pizzazz, much like a lemon or lime can,” she writes. “In the summer a few cilantro sprigs elevate even the simplest of salads.”
It is this deep adoration that drives the aversion to waste and consumer culture. Of course not everyone can replicate Sommaripa’s lifestyle, but Emmons’ graceful portrayal of the septuagenarian farmer acts like a mirror to our own environmental shortcomings, while also offering an appealing ideal to aspire to.
“Over the course of ten years, Eva and her garden transformed not only my cooking but also how I live,” Emmons writes. And after absorbing Wild Flavors, readers will find that Emmons has in turn transformed them.
Loading ...
Published by Island Press
Home to sea otters, whales, seals and dolphins, Monterey Bay has become one of the world’s most celebrated marine environments. But before whale watching and the famous aquarium, Monterey Bay was an exhausted ecosystem, many of its creatures driven to near extinction after centuries of exploitation.
In “The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival,” Stephen R. Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka capture the dramatic history of Monterey Bay, from its decline in the eighteenth century to its rejuvenation just decades ago. Woven throughout their tale of this tiny strip of central Californian coast are universal lessons for any environment — that nature is fragile in the face of human greed, but resilient with human care.
 The degradation of Monterey Bay began during the time of European imperial expansion. Viewing the Bay as an ecological treasure chest, countries took turns taking whatever would enrich them, no matter what the consequences to the environment.
The Spanish arrived first, in the late eighteenth century, on the hunt for sea otters. Luxurious otter furs were the fashion of the day, and were considered a mark of wealth in Europe and Asia. The British and the Russians soon joined in the California otter business, and by the early nineteenth century, were exporting thousands of otter pelts each year. Predictably, however, the otter fur trade was not sustainable. By the 1840’s, at the advent of the California Gold Rush, the commercial otter enterprise had collapsed.
The disappearance of otters from Monterey Bay led to a devastating domino effect beneath the waters. Without otters, the populations of red sea urchins and abalone, two of the otter’s main prey, exploded. As the sea urchins and abalone grew in numbers, they ate away at the thick kelp forest that provided a home for many species of fish.
Humans not only damaged Monterey Bay by what they took out of it, but also by what they put in it. As World War I began, the demand for canned foods increased, and sardine canneries were set up along the Bay’s coastline. The industry successfully out-maneuvered state fishing regulations, and canning quickly became the unfettered, singular economic engine on the coast of Monterey Bay. But fish canning is a dirty business — the canneries dumped their waste back into the ocean, polluting the water and air of Monterey Bay.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, the ecosystem of Monterey Bay appeared to have been destroyed forever. But the spunky mayor of Pacific Grove, a town on Monterey Bay, was determined to bring it back to life. A zoologist by training, Julia Platt drafted a new town charter, fought the state of California for the right to control the waters of Pacific Grove, and established a marine life refuge outside Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.
Although Platt died shortly after her first term as mayor, her efforts paid off — in 1938, the first otters were spotted in Big Sur, just south of Pacific Grove, and by the 1960’s, otters had come back to Monterey Bay for good. Platt’s protected waters helped create an environment otters could once again live in—but this time, otters were legally safeguarded from human hunting.
As in the destruction of Monterey Bay, otters proved an important link in the domino effect of restoring the Bay. Platt’s protected waters allowed abalone—which had also been hunted in Monterey Bay — to grow freely; drawn to this abundance of food, otters returned; when the number of herbivores abated, the kelp grew more freely; with their habitat back, fish rebounded and diversified; and seals returned.
“The reconstruction of an ecosystem, link by ecological link, is seldom seen in the modern environmental narrative,” Palumbi and Sotka write.
The creation of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 1970’s represented the final stage in the ocean’s restoration. The aquarium successfully shifted the economy of Monterey Bay so wealth was now generated through the health of the waters, not the exploitation of them. But more importantly, the aquarium succeeded in “a stunning revolution in environmental education and entertainment” that forever changed the way residents think about the ocean. It is this shift in consciousness that is perhaps the waters’ best protection.
“The Death and Life of Monterey Bay” is at once a heartening story of recovery and a powerful warning against the dangers of human excess. Although at times awkwardly written and organized, the message of Palumbi and Sotka is always clear. As they write to close their work: “It is the duty of those of us swaying to these [natural] cycles to learn the lesson of this recovery, celebrate it here, and create it elsewhere.”
Loading ...
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Pizza, pasta, salad, sandwich — the tomato regularly makes its way to the center of the American dinner plate. Squirted from a McDonald’s ketchup dispenser, toasted on a BLT or diced to decorate a bowl of greens, the tomato is one truly ubiquitous fruit.
 But behind the nation’s ruddy tomatoes lurk stories of chemicals, poison, migrant workers and slavery — stories that defy its wholesome image as America’s favorite fruit. In his new book, “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit,” journalist Barry Estabrook investigates these stories to answer the all-important foodie question: Where does this come from?
At the core of Estabrook’s work is the irony of Americans’ palate for tomatoes. As Americans developed a strong taste for tomatoes, their demand for them grew, and to feed their appetite, the summer fruits were grown year round. But the unnatural process of growing seasonal fruit through all twelve months drained tomatoes of their distinctive flavor — leaving American consumers with tasteless fruits that only resemble their ancestors in appearance. Loving their taste led to destroying their taste.
The bland supermarket tomato of today led Estabrook to Florida, the winter-warm state where tomatoes are grown off-season. Although the Floridian environment is perhaps the worst place to raise the fruit naturally, its temperatures and proximity to the populations of the East Coast and the Midwest made the state a logical business choice for industrial tomato growers.
As Estabrook puts it, “Tomato production in the state [of Florida] has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with biology.”
To compensate for the poor growing environment, Floridian tomato growers use a host of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides, and rely on huge amounts of fuel. Estabrook cites the astounding statistic that in a single year, nearly eight million pounds of insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides were put onto Florida’s tomato crop.
But one of the most shocking revelations in “Tomatoland” is that the fruits are harvested when green and hard — “mature green,” as the industry calls it — not when they are ripe. The underdeveloped fruits can endure long truck rides to far-away grocery stores, but to give off the appearance of ripeness, are sprayed with ethylene gas, which turns their skins red. Despite their deceptive coloring, the tomatoes are still unripe — and taste like it.
In addition to the environmental and gustatory aspects of the American tomato, Estabrook also spends a considerable number of pages on the social and political dimensions of the tomato. Focusing on the now well-known Immokalee workers, Estabrook shines a light on the many injustices perpetrated against farm workers plucking tomatoes from corporate fields.
Dismal living conditions, low and unpredictable pay, no medical benefits, no sick days, violence, and exposure to toxic chemicals plague tomato pickers, most of whom are migrant workers coming from south of the border. Life for tomato pickers is so exploitative that Fort Meyers’ chief assistant U.S. attorney Douglas Molloy called south Florida’s tomato fields “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”
Particularly disturbing is the story Estabrook tells of three women field workers who had been routinely exposed to dangerous amounts of chemicals during pregnancy. The women say they were not warned about the possible effects of such exposure, and each gave birth to babies with extreme defects and deformities. Facing what seemed like insurmountable legal odds, the families sued Ag-Mart, the company that owned the fields, for damages and set off an impressive chain of court cases and community activism demanding the fair treatment of tomato pickers.
Surprisingly, Estabrook says nothing about the tomato’s most popular processed form — ketchup. With 650 million bottles and 11 billion single-serving packets sold around the world each year by Heinz alone, it seems the condiment deserves at least a chapter in a book about tomatoes. And considering the recent politics of ketchup in school cafeterias — its controversial classification as a vegetable serving — a discussion of the sauce would have fit squarely into one of the book’s subtle themes: when does a tomato stop being a tomato?
Nevertheless, readers of “Tomatoland” will never look at a tomato the same way again. Reading this new book, audiences will marvel at their newfound knowledge of the tomato and will have fun doing it. Never technical or tedious, Estabrook finds the rare balance between the informative and the enjoyable — a truly delicious summer read.
For more of Barry Estabrook’s writing, visit his blog at Politics of the Plate.
Loading ... |
Meet Caitlin 
Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil is a freelance writer who loves growing, cooking, eating and writing about food. She studied at Harvard Divinity School and Northwestern University and was recently named a 2011 National Health Journalism Fellow by the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. In addition to food, Caitlin also loves traveling. She spent a year in Sri Lanka as a Fulbright scholar and has also traveled through Japan, Morocco, India, South Africa, Egypt, and Turkey. She now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband. |
Recent Comments