Food History and Production

Starting with the introduction to Estabrook’s Tomatoland, he compares modern tomatoes to those that were grown in the 1960’s. This comparison that he makes is very interesting in the way that he tells his personal accounts of tomatoes. Estabrook explains about what he saw following a tomato truck in Florida, “A ten-foot drop followed by a sixty-mile­ per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.” Modern fresh tomatoes are nothing like they used to be. A fresh tomato from the 1960’s would hit the ground after falling off of this truck and splatter but a modern tomato acquires almost no damage when it falls off of a speeding truck. Pollan focuses more on the side of animal rights. He explains how first blacks got their rights, then women, and animals are next in line. Pollan states that the thought that animals are just machines are just not the case anymore, “One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens.” Basically he is saying that animal’s deserve the same rights as humans and will get them in the coming years. Finally, Cook’s infographic explains how a lot of the diseases in animals is caused by the way we raise them to eat. Because chickens are kept in such close quarters and temperatures in upwards of 100 degrees we cause these birds to get sick. This was not the case back in the day when chickens we raised on local farms.

All 3 of these readings explain how everything we do with food has or will change with time. Estabrook looks mainly at how tomatoes have changed over time. How what is classified as a fresh tomato in modern society is nothing compared to a tomato in the 1960’s. Pollan and Cook focus mostly on the meat producing side of the food that we eat. Pollan explains how animals back in the day were viewed as a machine but as time goes on we are figuring out that that is not true. That they will get their rights just like all humans have. Cook talks mostly about the treatment of chickens. How the conditions that we raise them in is terrible. Simply put, all 3 are saying that the way we interact with our food, from production to being eaten, changes with time.