The average tomato today contains 62 percent less calcium, 19 percent less niacin, and 30 percent less Vitamin C than just a few decades ago. The products of industrial tomato farms are uniform, tasteless, and nutritionally devoid—because they were bred to be that way. Although tomato seeds originated in Mexico, the hybridized and genetically engineered varieties planted there today, and the chemicals used to grow them, are increasingly the property of multinational corporations like Cargill or Monsanto. These companies loom ever larger over our food system: in the United States, ten agribusiness conglomerates account for half of all food sales.

It took many hands to pick, process, pack, unpack, and put this tomato on display. Nearly one in six employed Americans works in the production, marketing, distribution, and preparation of food. Like many jobs in the burgeoning service economy, food service jobs are poorly paid, unreliable, and offer few opportunities for advancement. In one survey, only 13 percent of employees in the food sector reported earning a living wage. Compared with those in other occupations, these workers were more likely to be employed part-time, lack health insurance, and need welfare benefits. Walmart reaps 18 percent of the $76 billion a year paid out for food stamps, a portion of which comes from workers it pays so little that they qualify for the program. Cruelly, food service employees are still substantially more likely than the general population to be unable to afford enough to eat.

Embedded within this tomato, and every other item on the supermarket shelves, is a history of human exploitation and ecological harm. Yet the average consumer won’t see the uprooted laborer in Mexico, the greenhouse-gas-emitting truck that brought the tomato to New York, or even the underpaid worker in the D’Agostino back room. Instead, he or she sees only the products themselves: the forty thousand different items on offer in a typical supermarket. These goods are symbols of America’s historically unprecedented superabundance of cheap food (the average family in 2012 spent only 10 percent of disposable income on food, nearly the lowest figure ever recorded) and the high social and environmental cost at which that abundance comes.

In recent years, activists, journalists, and scholars have begun to expose the hidden underside of our food system. Best-selling books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation chronicled the problematic paths that our food takes to our plates. A wide range of social movements, too, have made increasingly audible calls for reform in the food system, demanding that all consumers—not just wealthy ones a short Prius drive from the local farmer’s market—have access to food that is organic, fair-trade, and free from genetically modified organisms.