Supermarket tomato facts
A
friend of mine asked me the other day "What's the big deal about eating a
Supermarket tomato?".
1. The average tomato farmer
in Florida spends 2000 dollars per acre in chemicals to kill all the
bugs, weeds, and molds.
2.You never know exactly
which chemicals are in play because they've got a huge arsenal to
choose from which includes endosulfan, azoxystrobin, chlorothalonil,
methamidophos, permethrin
trans, permethrin cis, fenpropathrin, trifloxystrobin, o-phenylphenol,
pieronyl butoxide, acetamprid, pyrimethanil, boscalid, bifenthrin,
dicofol p., thiamethoxam, chlorpyrifos, dicloran, flonicamid,
pyriproxyfen, omethoate, pyraclostrobin, famoxadone, clothianidin,
cypermethrin, clothianidin, cypermethrin, fenhexamid, oxamyl, diazinon,
buprofezin, cyazofamid, deltamethrin, acephate, and folpet.
You can read about more
industrial facts from segments
of Barry Estabrook's new book titled "Tomatoland" at Onearth.org.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Mark,
You have more patience to type in all those chemical names than I would have had!!! That is quite a list. A while ago I spoke to a vendor at Costco who was selling sausages and other items. He said that if they cannot pronounce it they do not use it! Too bad all food products don't use that same way of thinking.
The answer is even more simple than your chemical attack on his question. Supermarket tomatoes taste like crap. No surprise as I picked them 20 years ago when I was a kid and we'd pick them green if they had a red star on the bottom of them. So they were never truly ripe.
Frankly, arguing with people who don't care about how their food tastes is pointless. If they're willing to eat food that tastes like crap then they certainly don't care if it is crap.
That's what I was thinking of commenting, but I figured it went without saying.
Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people haven't ever tasted good vegetables, so they have no idea how bad the storebought stuff tastes.