Image credit: Encyclopedia Pictura
From anarchist bed and breakfasts to communal woodland dwellings, we've featured a fair few DIY, low impact communities in our time. One of the most common criticisms we hear of the crunchier end of hippy living is that it is "neo-luddite", rejecting the modern world and hankering for a simpler, perhaps fictional, time. But that certa...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image credit: Andertoons via Flickr/CC BY
Captain Planet will be the latest beloved children's cartoon to get the live action film treatment -- and from the producer of the bafflingly successful 'Transformers' movie franchise no less! So one thing's for certain: A ton of people are going to see this film....Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photos: Shawn Connell and Katz Chiao
When confronted with a large open loft space, one's initial reaction may be to use walls or dividers to divvy up the space. Not so for architects Deborah and Terri Chiao of New York and Philadelphia-based design and research collaborative Katz Chiao. The pair eschewed the wall and turned a residential loft in Brooklyn into an intimate haven by building in an elevated treehouse and cabin, still leaving enough shared space for an open kitchen, dining/work area and mini-gardens....Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo credit: Wonderlane/Creative Commons
Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world's people. The over...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo credit: Wonderlane/Creative Commons
Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world's people. The over...Read the full story on TreeHugger
The tiny island nation of Nauru is in big trouble. Multinational corporations -- and then the nation itself -- strip mined the once tropical isle into oblivion for its phosphate. Now, sea level rise, driven by climate change, is threatening to consume the coastline; the only part of the island that's still inhabitable. The nation's president just published a wonderful op-ed in the NY Times -- not to ask for pity, but to ask us to view his country's predicament as a metaphor for the looming crises caused by the changed climate. He then calls f...Read the full story on TreeHugger
I’m going to try to never again buy a supermarket tomato.
Partly that’s because they have so little taste–a sad fact I’m reminded of every summer when we buy our tomatoes at a local farmer’s market. Any resemblance between a locally-grown tomato and the industrial tomatoes sold in supermarkets and restaurants, particularly in winter, is strictly coincidental.
Mostly, though, it’s because I now understand what goes into the production of a tomato in Florida–the nation’s No. 1 tomato-growing state, which supplies virtually all of the fresh, field-grown tomatoes sold between October and June. That’s thanks to a terrific new book called, appropriately, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.
This eye-opening expose by veteran food writer Barry Estabrook, who formerly contributed to Gourmet, now writes for The Atlantic and blogs at his own site, Politics of the Plate, is a worthy addition to the growing number of books on my shelf that takes us behind the scenes of today’s alimentary-industrial complex, books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish. From bookstores to the blogosphere, food writing these days is smarter and more tough-minded than ever.
The Florida tomato story isn’t new. Writing in The New Yorker back in 1977, Thomas Whiteside chronicled the sorry state of supermarket tomatoes. In this deeply-reported book, Estabrook finds that not much has changed since then.
There’s lots not to like about the way tomatoes are grown in Florida, but the most memorable scenes in Tomatoland portray the Dickensian conditions under which migrant workers toil in Florida’s tomato fields. Children as young as 12 do farm work. Workers are paid, at least in part, by the number of containers of fruit they pick, a system that often leaves them with less than the minimum wage. They are on call daily, but work only when needed. They get no sick benefits, no vacation and if they are hurt on the job, they pay their own medical bills, assuming they can afford to see see a doctor. Estabrook writes:
This might explain why the life expectancy of a migrant worker in the United States is only forty-nine years….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.
Wait, it gets worse. While earning poverty wages for doing backbreaking work, tomato pickers risk being exposed to pesticides. While regulations require those workers who handle pesticides to use protective eye-wear, gloves, aprons and respirators, the rules are poorly enforced. Because Florida’s sandy soil is not well suited for agriculture, growers
pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal…The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens and babies born with horrendous birth defects.
…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.
In a particularly heartbreaking chapter, Estabrook details the struggles of three women who lived in a labor camp near Immokalee, Florida, and had children born within a few weeks of each other with severe birth defects.
Big brands, it turns out, are part of the problem. When a coalition of farm workers brought pressure on Burger King, Taco Bell and McDonald’s to pay more for Florida tomatoes and set aside the money for the workers, the “vice president of food safety, quality assurance and regulatory affairs” at Burger King responded by going online and using an assumed name to smear the organizers of the farmworkers as “the lowest form of life.” Nice, huh. Eventually, the fast-food outlets came around to support the workers.
Barry Estabrook
The strangest thing about this story is that although the social and environmental costs of growing tomatoes in Florida is high, the benefits to consumers are low–and by design. Florida tomatoes are bred so that they can be picked and shipped with minimal damage, last a long time on store shelves and present a consistent appearance. Taste? Well, as Estabrook explains, “the structure of a tomato…makes breeding for both taste and toughness a difficult balancing act.”
Harry Klee, a University of Florida professor who is trying to design better tomatoes, puts it this way:
As you focus on making the tomato bigger and firmer, you are ruining the flavor, pure and simple…What we have ended up with is something that’s large but has basically had all the good points diluted out of it. They’ve essentially taken the package and added water.
Estabrook’s conclusion: “Florida’s tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated.”
My conclusion: No more Florida tomatoes for me.
Photo credit: The Ewan via Flickr
Image: Polycart via flickr
That's right, according to a recent study, if you stroll the aisles of a supermarket with a shopping cart instead of a basket, you're likely to make healthier choices. Published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the study found that basket carriers were more than three times as likely to choose unhealthy items over healthy items than their cart-pushing counterparts. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo by Mark Chapman photo via Flickr CC
According to a study led by the Rovira i Virgili University the scientific community to access and analyze only 20% of the recorded climate information the world has on hand. The rest... well it's never made it into digital format....Read the full story on TreeHugger
The Guardian has a must-read piece on the Yellowstone River oil spill and the impact it has had on locals during the two weeks since the rupture. Reporter Kate Sheppard spoke with residents, and crafts a poignant warning about what damage oil pipeline spills can cause -- especially when residents aren't even told there is a spill, or were aware a pipeline existed at all.
Read the full piece at The Guardian. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Stair at Art Gallery of Ontario by Frank Gehry; Image credit Wood Works Ontario
Tim Wall at Discovery News adds another "R" to our growing list (we are up to ten): Reconsider our choices of building materials. He points us to a new study published in Carbon Management that looks at the full life-cycle ana...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image via Rori Cross Brown
We all know about Brazil's rainforests and how rapidly they're disappearing to serve every need from toilet paper to feed for pigs. However, we don't necessarily know much about Brazil's Cerrado Savannah, which is under just as much pressure as supermarkets strive for stocked shelves. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image credit: Fully Charged
Brian has already test driven the Chevy Volt for TreeHugger, and he liked what he saw. Now comedy legend and EV evangelist Robert Llewellyn has taken a spin in its subtly different European counterpart, the Vauxhall Ampera. (Vauxhall is the UK brand name for Opel.)
Was he similarly impressed? ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
The UK Government's recent u-turn on public electric car charging infrastructure highlighted an important debate—are public charging stations a necessary precursor to wide-scale adoption of electric vehicles? On the one hand, some evidence suggests that fears over range anxiety are overblown, and that drivers will charge at home overnight, but on the other hand, a public that is used to filling up wherever and whenever it wants...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo: Mairi Beautyman
This is Max, at about 12 hours old, windmilling his flippers in the air. He (or perhaps she) is one of 100 baby green sea turtles I helped release into the sea.
While the adult Chelonia mydas has only a few known predators -- sharks, leopards (in Africa), and man -- a baby sea turtle's early life is one of grave danger. The statistics are abominable: An average of one or two hatchlings from 1,000 eggs will reach the 30-50 year...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo Credit: Kelly Rossiter
My friend Barb, who I am travelling with in the French Alps, is a professed non-cook. However, she announced the other night that she could make artichokes and would make them for dinner. The artichokes here are bigger than any I have ever cooked, and two artichokes shared amongst four people was more than enough. Much as I do love artichokes, I have always viewed them as a device to move butter into my mouth. Consequently, I usually make the easiest thing possible, melted butt...Read the full story on TreeHugger
A paper-waste recycling workshop in Brazil. Photo: "It's Not Easy Being Green."
From the organizers of a prestigious annual competition in Australia to Balinese craftspeople selling their wares on the street, the world is full of people designing a better world, a little bit at a time. Two European designers are meeting as many as they can on a globe-trotting tour of sustainable des...Read the full story on TreeHugger
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