Clearly an enormous amount of research has gone into this book. Barndt, a Canadian academic, traces the journey of the Mexican tomatoes (or Mexican-picked tomatoes) that end up in Canada. Through this, she investigates the role of women in the tomato industry: overworked, underpaid, and exploited. More so in Mexico than Canada, although the exploration of how part-time employees (overwhelmingly women) in Canadian fast food restaurants and supermarkets doesn't exactly paint a shining picture of equality either. The epilogue, in which Barndt takes one of her Mexican worker friends to the airport after her season picking tomatoes in Canada is over is frankly shocking: this seasonal worker, and all the others like her, not only travel in a cargo plane but are literally listed as cargo themselves. 

In general, the intersection of gender and race and how it applies to food production is done really well, and limiting the study to the production of a single fruit focuses it down to manageable level. That said, it took me months to read this, and I very nearly gave it a lower score. Once I got to around the middle of the book, things picked up - mostly because this was when the interviews with different women become more of a focus, as did the circumstances of their lives. I remember the first quarter or so as a tedious theoretical slog, however, and the regular return to theory at various points during the narrative did far less to make the intersectional connections clear than the bits that dealt with actual people. I'm glad I slogged through to the good parts, because this really is an interesting and valuable book, but my goodness, it took a while for me to get into it.