Tomatoland
What a Long Strange Trip it's Been... For Your Salad...
A review of Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook; Published by Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC; Available in Hardcover (2011)

By reviewer Alex johnston

Epitomizing the maxim that “truth is stranger than fiction,” Barry Estabrook's new book about the Florida tomato industry, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, is a book of literals. A cocktail of poisons literally burns all pre-existing life out of the soil before tomatoes are planted. Many of the fruit pickers are kept in a state of literal slavery – locked up at night and forced to work with threats of torture or murder. And even the migrant workers who are merely underpaid and exploited are often so overexposed to sprayed pesticides that they return from the fields with clothes soaked through. And what do we as a society purchase for this high environmental and human price? Unhealthy tomatoes (current crops of tomatoes contain about 14 times the sodium compared to crops picked 50 years ago) that are picked under ripe, gassed to make them look red and are largely tasteless.
However, Estabrook makes an effort to leaven his horror stories by giving equal time to a haphazard alliance of lawyers, home builders, concerned locals and self-helping fruit workers who struggle to improve the treatment of the migrant and largely illegal populations who work in the fields keeping this industry afloat. We also learn about scientists laboriously combining and refining breeds to try and overcome the peculiar vulnerabilities of the tomato (so lessening the need for the chemicals to protect the crops) while trying to pump up the taste and restore the nutrition. Finally we meet one of the new breed of growers (whose type will be familiar to readers of this magazine) struggling to raise crops of heirloom tomatoes and paying fair wages to workers, whose careful custodianship takes the place of the toxic soup of chemicals required on the Floridian fields.
This is an excellent book to read when you want to count your blessings that you live in Fruitland. If, like me, you live in one of the Niagara region's cities, you may find yourself wanting to head down to your local famer's market and give them all a big hug after reading this eye-opening and sobering book.

Canada on Fire
The War of 1812

Marking 200 years of peace, 2012 will mark the bicentennial anniversary of the War of 1812, one of the component  conflicts of the French Revolutionary/ Napoleonic Wars that seized the world for almost a quarter century between 1792 and 1815. Although the Napoleonic Wars were primarily a European affair, they were global in impact. Battlefields ranged from metropolitan France, to the steppes of Russia, the ports of South Asia, the deserts of the Middle East, and the farms of colonial North America. In particular, due to a combination of history, geography and strategy, Lake Ontario and the Niagara Peninsula became the fulcrum around which the land war between American and Canada turned.
I encourage you to check your local papers and historical societies for some of the events that will be going on to mark this anniversary – there's never going to be a better time to learn about this defining moment in local history. As my small contribution to the festivities, I'm looking forward to reviewing one 1812-themed title per issue this year, starting with…

Threads of War
A review of Canada on Fire, by Jennifer Crump; published by Dundurn; Available in Paperback (2011)

Canada on Fire is really eleven short books about the War of 1812 – each chapter is a description of the entire war, beginning to end, as experienced by one of a number of colourful characters. These include well-known figures like the redoubtable General Brock, and the revered and reviled Chief Tecumseh. But Crump also collects less well-known figures like William McKay, the North West Trading company agent turned British commando; James Fitzgibbon and his Green Tigers, who refused to abandon the Niagara Peninsula when the English army did, and would eventually receive Laura Secord's warning; and the doughty Dr. John Strachan, who would become the de facto community leader of York during the legendary American raid that burned it to the ground, and who would go on to become a Toronto institution.
Reading each of these stories consecutively, one finds oneself revisiting several moments from multiple perspectives (often a footnote in one story recurs as a defining passage in another, for instance), which helps to bring the war into focus as an event in individuals' lives instead of an abstract piece of history.