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By jamie, February 20, 2012 8:35 am

I used to eat way too much fast food. Those who have been with me awhile know I have read a few books on the subject of the food industry, but even with all I have learned, I have struggled in the past to avoid the comfort and convenience of food handed to me through my car window. I am doing much better today: In 2011, my New Year’s Resolution was to not eat anything from McDonald’s (this was extremely difficult at first, but now, over a year later, I still haven’t had so much as a french fry from there) and I gave up all fast food for Lent (this was a challenge). I can’t remember how many times I have had fast food so far this year. I think it was once, but it may have been twice. The fact that I have lost 20 pounds has certainly helped me stay motivated, but it’s more than that – I feel better overall about the choices I’m making for myself and my family.

I read chapters 5-6 of the book, and learned about a national anti-fast food campaign that did not sound one bit familiar to me even though it originated right here in Florida. This part of the book talks about what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have accomplished through grassroots efforts. It took them several years, but they were able to talk several major fast food chains to pay an extra penny per carton of tomatoes (not sure how many tomatoes this is) and have that extra penny go directly to the workers who pick the tomatoes. One penny. They started with Taco Bell over ten years ago, and moved on others. Now they have moved on to grocery stores (more on that later).

They have also put themselves at risk to stop modern day slavery and to end the practices of terrorizing (beating, etc.) farm workers to force them to put up with horrible working conditions. The group actually started after a man was beaten by a crew leader. “The next morning, when the crew boss who had beaten Edgar pulled up to the parking lot in his bus, not a soul would get aboard. Other crew leaders took note. That happened in 1996.” Coalition members say that beatings stopped after this action – before this, workers were so afraid for their own safety that they would look the other way instead of banding together.

This chapter really exposed gaps in my education and cultural knowledge. Not only was I not away of the CIW, I was also very unfamiliar with the methods used by civil rights groups to train victims on how to protect their own civil rights. Estabrook specifically mentions “popular education” techniques, developed by Paulo Freire in the 1960s. I had to look up his book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is still in print. Estabrook elaborates on some of the popular education techniques, namely how they use nontraditional teaching methods – using music, theater, etc. in part to help bridge language barriers while establishing solidarity. I would like to learn more about Freire’s teaching methods.

About grocery stores, the book says that Whole Foods penned a deal with the CIW, but that other grocery stores did not (at least they had not at the time this chapter was written). According to their website, Trader Joe’s recently signed with them, too (how I miss you, Trader Joe’s). Guess what store they are targeting now? Publix – the store I shop at. On the CIW “take action” page, there is a letter template to take to Publix managers (you have to scroll down a bit) – I have already printed my copy and will advise our family to take copies to the store as well. There are letter templates for others grocery chains, as well as a generic one for everyone else.

Important quote:

the life expectancy of a migrant worker in the United States is only forty-nine years. According to U.S. Labor Department figures, migrant workers typically make between $10,000 and $12,000 a year, a figure that is distorted because it includes the higher wages paid to field supervisors. Based on forty-hour work weeks, that means workers’ hourly earnings are between five and six dollars, well below minimum wage. The average household income for farm workers in the United States is between $15,000 and $17,500 a year, well below the federal poverty line of $20,650 and less than half of what is considered a living wage for someone residing in Immokalee.

Once again, we have evidence that our food choices affect the civil rights of others. I am doubly sure we won’t be buying tomatoes from Publix for the foreseeable future.

This section of the book also allows the growers to share their side of the story. It was pretty upsetting to read – I can’t say I felt any sympathy for them.

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By jamie, February 18, 2012 1:31 pm

A few hours ago, my daughter asked me what I was reading, and what it was all about. “I’m reading a book called Tomatoland, and I am learning why we can’t buy tomatoes at the grocery store anymore.” She got a disappointed look on her face, so I continued, trying to explain human rights atrocities in language appropriate for a three-year-old: “The companies that grow tomatoes and sell them to the grocery store are run by people who don’t care about anyone but themselves. They keep bugs off of their plants by spraying them with poisons, and if there are workers picking tomatoes, they spray them with poison too, even though it makes them sick and hurts their babies.”

She got a look of horror and confusion on her face. After a minute or so, she said, “I guess that means we have to plant a lot of tomatoes in our garden instead.” Indeed we will.

So, we still have grape tomatoes in the fridge, packaged with a “Santa Sweets” logo – imagine my sadness when this company (AgMart) was actually used as a case study in how horrible the Florida tomato industry is [I read Chapters 3-4]: After several women gave birth to severely deformed babies (one died) after they had worked in AgMart tomato fields throughout their pregnancies, a lawsuit was filed. The book excerpts the testimony of Donald Long, AgMart CEO at the time. Talk about weaselly – he said that employees were warned of the risks of pesticides – signs, written in English, were posted at the work sites, even though the workers could not speak or read in English (or Spanish in many cases). The worst part of his testimony: though he acknowledged that animal studies found that the chemicals used in the fields were likely to cause reproductive harm, he repeatedly insisted that this evidence was not enough to prove that humans would (or could) also be harmed in this way.

I have heard a lot of people complain about illegal immigrants, calling them “criminals” and recommending that no social services be provided to them and their families. Their anger is misplaced, and I wish we would regulate businesses at the same level as we regulate immigration – the real criminals are company executives who knowingly allow human rights violations to happen in their fields and factories.

Many illegal immigrants are here because they were recruited specifically by companies, or those working for them – in some cases they are promised a place to live, a good job, and sometimes they are led to believe they will get assistance with obtaining legal citizenship. Because they are here illegally, smugglers (and employers) know that they are unlikely to report human rights violations, so many don’t think twice about doing things like spraying them with deadly pesticides, or selling them into slavery.

“Government statistics suggest that a total of about fifteen thousand new human trafficking incidents take place in the United States each year (no one has a precise figure).” The book describes people being locked in the back of box trucks and forced to work in the fields. If they try to escape, they are beaten or even killed. Because victims are here illegally, and because they are constantly terrorized, they are very unlikely to notify authorities, so most of these crimes go unreported. Even when unscrupulous “crew bosses” are prosecuted, they are still able to find employment at other major tomato companies after they serve their sentences.

Here’s just one of many disturbing quotes in these chapters:

The original version of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act included language that would have made it possible to jail those who profit by “knowing or having reason to know” that workers under their ultimate control were enslaved. That would have included the executives of the large tomato companies. According to testimony by the coalition’s Benitez at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, just as it seemed like the bill would pass easily with that language, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) insisted that the clause be removed from the act.

Shame on you, Orrin Hatch, and other politicians like you. I hate that politicians claim to be so morally upstanding, and then they show how immoral they really are by letting big businesses get away with whatever they want in favor of a higher bottom line (and higher campaign donations).

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By jamie, February 16, 2012 11:05 am

My daughter loves tomatoes. Her favorites are grape tomatoes, which are bite-sized and sweet. I can’t really tell you what the ones from our garden taste like, because she eats them all, preferably while standing right next to the plant she just plucked them from. She doesn’t like the green ones, though – she tried it once, when she was impatient for more to ripen, and she was pretty disappointed with the flavor. Now she knows it’s worth the wait to let them ripen on the vine.

According to Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook, vine-ripening is not allowed here in Florida, where most of the nation’s fresh tomatoes are grown. They last longer and prone to bruising of picked without any trace of red, then they are exposed to ethylene gas to force them to “ripen.” Even those who approve of this technique admit that it harms the flavor of the food. I guess this explains why I have never really been a fan of tomatoes – when I was a kid I didn’t like them at all, and now I really only like them if they are served with flavorful dressings or sauces (vinaigrette, mayo, hummus, etc.) or on a cheeseburger. Even then, sometimes I swear that taste like soap.

Flavor is one thing, but evidently they are less healthy for us than they used to be before these factory-farming techniques became the norm. “Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today 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 the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.”

I remember reading – I think it was in a book by Dr. Atkins (the late low-carb guru) – that described fruit (specifically oranges) as being far higher in sugar than it was 100 years ago. I would imagine that most of the sugar increase is due to selective breeding, but it also makes sense that plants “are what they eat” in much the same way humans are. If the soil is pumped with pesticides and bleach and synthetic nutrients selected only to increase yield, it’s no wonder store-bought tomatoes sometimes taste like soap.

I read the introduction to the book as well as the first two chapters, and I will not be able to scratch the surface with my posts. Who knew that a book on tomatoes could be so riveting? I will just choose three points to share with you here:

1. There is a great deal of evidence that human slavery is still occurring in the U.S., specifically in tomato fields in Florida. I’m pretty sure Chapter 3 is going to delve more deeply into this, but I have already read enough that I have decided to avoid tomatoes in restaurants and from the grocery store until I can be convinced that this is no longer the case. Here is the quote that did it for me:

In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, South Florida’s tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Molloy is not talking about virtual slavery, or near slavery, or slaverylike conditions, but real slavery. In the last fifteen years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than one thousand men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported. Workers were “sold” to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn’t feel like working or were too sick or weak to work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards.

2. Florida is not the optimal place to grow tomatoes without a great deal of effort. As a marginally successful Florida gardener, this makes me feel simultaneously better and worse. As someone who has battled ants, various worms and caterpillars, spider mites, fungi (including the time I accidentally grew some strange mushrooms, presumably by over-watering), extreme heat (which caused my ripening cucumbers to explode this past summer), and seasonal light shifts that necessitate a complicated (and unsuccessful) attempt at using mirrors to bounce enough sunlight onto failing plants, it is a (very small) relief to know that I am attempting to do something that is really hard – particularly without resorting to “chemical, biological, and scorched-earth warfare.’

It really is worth it to buy organic food. Non-organic food can contain really dangerous chemicals, the kind that can cause birth defects, cancers, and other terrible things. We can peel it or wash the food all day long, and we won’t get all of the toxins out, because they slip into the food itself through roots, stems, and any sort of blemish on the surface. And we have been conditioned to prefer pretty produce (round, shiny, etc.) – I have spoken with several people who avoid organic produce because it’s not visually appealing. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that I, too, have passed over the organic section because I thought the food looked a little too beat up (this was before Michael Pollan, but still).

I have two store-bought tomatoes in the refrigerator, as well as two cartons of grape tomatoes. Little Mama and I will finish those up, but then we have buy them from the farmer’s market if we want more. I can’t wait to read on. Also, I have to figure out how many EarthTainers we will need to build this year (we have one so far).

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By jamie, May 26, 2011 10:02 am

This book is becoming a source of anxiety for me. I have read the first two sections and have come to the realization that Amy Chua wrote this and other books, taught at Yale, traveled, and did all sorts of other things, all while keeping her daughters on track to be competitive musicians. And she looks terrific – have you seen her? She looks young, fit and vibrant, so obviously she takes care of herself too. Her time management skills must be extraordinary.

And her daughters – not only are they extremely talented in music, they do incredibly well in school, too. She excerpts an essay written by Sophia, the eldest, when she was fourteen – I was so impressed with it that I had to read it aloud. Her vocabulary, her turn of phrase, and her subject matter – the creative process behind learning the piano piece that earned her a performance at Carnegie Hall – it sounds trite, but it gave me chills and made me feel blessed just to be able to read it.

Chua describes an incident involving birthday cards that I can’t stop thinking about. Her daughters gave her homemade cards on her birthday one year, and she rejected them because they were not up to par. She could tell that they were just thrown together, and she told the girls that she knew they could do a better job. She mocks “Western” parents for praising every little thing their kids do even if their work is shoddy. I know what she means but, while I agree with her, I’m not sure I would have the personal fortitude to reject a gift. I have read about false praise and I think it is damaging to kids. When Little Mama shows me her work, I am honest with her – if it doesn’t look like the house she was trying to draw, I don’t lie and say “what a great house.” Instead, I say something like, “you’re getting really good at straight lines. Keep practicing and you will be drawing beautiful houses in no time.”

Another part of this section spoke to me. Chua had been taking the girls to the same music school for years when she started hearing that maybe she should step things up a few notches to help the be truly competitive. One friend who pointed this out to her added, “maybe you just want to keep things fun.” I hope that my kids can look back and honestly remember an incredibly fun, happy childhood, but I also want them to learn a lot during that fleeting time. I plan to look around at the local preschools this summer to make sure she is in the right place this fall. Living in a relatively small town, we are very limited in our choices – the upside is that it shouldn’t be too difficult to explore every single one of our options. I want it to be fun, but can’t it be challenging at the same time? I know that some of their best learning takes place while they are playing, but they all do some classroom work – I want Little Mama to have the best quality classroom experience possible.

One more thing – as I have been reading this book, I have been rather astonished with the amount of money Amy Chua spends. Her parents are immigrants, and throughout the book she refers to herself as a Chinese parent. She holds other commonly-held Chinese beliefs, such as having respect for one’s parents and taking in elderly family members (my culture shares this tradition) instead of the Western way of putting them out to pasture, so it seems odd that she would be so different in this area. I guess she realized that she might be causing some raised eyebrows, because she explains this – she admits that her flair for extravagance is extremely unusual, and says she gets it from her father.

Scroll down for other posts about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

Review
Part 1: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua
Part 2: Try the Extra Credit
Part 3: Keeping Things Fun
Part 4: Out of Control
Part 5: Do The Work

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By jamie, August 9, 2010 10:41 pm

One of the most fascinating (and disturbing parts) of my reading today (I read through chapter 7) was about the flavor/fragrance factories, top secret places where scientists mix “volatile chemicals” into perfumes, fragrances for household products, and both natural and artificial flavors (including the taste we expect when we bite into a fast food burger).

If you are interested in learning more about where your food comes from, fast food in particular, you may want to spend an hour or so with this book in the library or bookstore if you don’t plan to read the entire thing. When I read, I put little bookmarks on the pages I want to share with you and I had to stop this time because I was marking every page. Here are a few facts (if I haven’t mentioned it before, this book has an extensive notes section, so I’m going to trust what I read here with one caveat – the book was published almost ten years ago, so some things have certainly changed since then):

• Natural flavoring is really no different than artificial flavoring, and sometimes the artificial one is better for you. Other times they are exactly the same chemical obtained through a different process.
• “Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at a fast food restaurant, perhaps 2 cents goes to the farmer who grew the potatoes.”
• Natural flavors are sometimes derived from meat products, and labels do not have to reflect this. Vegetarian friends, is this still true?
• Carmine (aka carminic acid or cochineal extract) is a pigment made from the ground up bodies of a small insect. It is (was) used to make things pink, red, or purple, and is (was) in Dannon strawberry yogurt and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink, as well as other unnamed products.
• Chicken McNuggets contain “twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.”
• One more, in honor of GB: “The chemical that provides the dominant flavor of bell pepper can be tasted in amounts as low as .02 parts per billion; one drop is sufficient to add flavor to average size swimming pools.” I guess my husband is right when he says he can taste bell peppers even in minuscule amounts (of course he doesn’t like bell peppers).

Most of my reading today was not so entertaining. For those who have watched Food, Inc. (I will blog about this when I get to finish watching it) or those who have read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it talks extensively about the evils of the farming industry. Schlosser emphasizes worker safety and compensation in his discussion – I admit that I read faster, almost skimmed a bit, because it’s so sad to hear about the people at the other side of fast food (as opposed to the rags-to-riches stories of so many restaurant founders – no riches here).

One point it makes is that illegal immigrants are being used as meat processors now. I say “being used” because some companies run ads in Mexican newspapers to recruit workers, and one company even bussed in a group of undocumented workers and dropped them off at a homeless shelter (then unsuccessfully tried to pay the shelter to provide worker housing). We hear so much in the media about undocumented workers being “criminals” and yet wealthy business people are not generally punished for this kind of thing – that’s “just business” you know.

Other posts about Fast Food Nation:

Post 1: Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Post 2: The Happiest Food on Earth
Post 3: Those Tasty Fries