Investigative journalist BARRY ESTABROOK will discuss and sign TOMATOLAND: HOW MODERN INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE DESTROYED OUR MOST ALLURING FRUIT based on his James Beard Award-winning article.  Estabrook’s expose’ of the human and environmental cost of the modern tomato industry reads like a suspenseful whodunit. Praised by everyone from Bill McKibben and Eric Schlosser to Jacques Pepin and Ruth Reichl, Tomatoland should be of special interest to Floridians at any point in the tomato food chain. Of all our fruits and vegetables, none suffers at the hand of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the winter fields of our state. When Barry is behind a heavy truck in Florida, he thinks it’s full of Granny Smith apples, but when some green orbs fly off the truck, they turn out to be almost indestructible tomatoes “so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine,”  as lacking in nutrition as they are in taste.

Estabrook has been an editor at Gourmet and Eating Well magazines, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Men’s Health, and the Washington Post, has been anthologized in the Best American Food Writing series, and contributes regularly to the Atlantic Monthly website.