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The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table Hardcover – February 21, 2012

by Tracie McMillan (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 240 ratings
Goodreads Choice Award nominee
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In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, an ambitious and accessible work of undercover journalism that fully investigates our food system to explain what keeps Americans from eating well—and what we can do about it.

Getting Americans to eat well is one of today’s hottest social issues; it’s at the forefront of Michelle Obama’s agenda and widely covered in the media—from childhood obesity to store brands trying to make their food healthier. Yet most Americans still eat poorly, and award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan wanted to know why. So, in 2009 McMillan went to work undercover in our nation’s food system alongside America’s working poor, living and eating off her wages, to examine how we eat.

McMillan worked on industrial farms in California, in a Walmart produce section outside Detroit, and at an Applebee’s kitchen in New York City. Her vivid narrative brings readers along to grueling work places, introduces them to her coworkers, and takes them home to her kitchen, to see what kind of food she (and her coworkers) can afford to buy and prepare. With striking precision, McMillan also weaves in the story of how we got here, digging deep into labor, economics, politics, and social science to reveal new and surprising truths about how America’s food is grown, sold, and prepared—and what it would take to change the system.

Fascinating and timely, this groundbreaking work examines why eating well in America—despite the expansion of farmer’s markets and eat local movements—is limited to the privileged minority.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    336 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Scribner
  4. Publication date
    February 21, 2012
  5. Dimensions
    6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1439171955
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1439171950
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The book Ms. McMillan's most resembles is Barbara Ehrenreich's bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Like Ms. Ehrenreich, Ms. McMillan goes undercover amid this country's working poor...This is a voice the food world needs."

- Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"This book is vital. McMillan has the writing skills to bear witness, the research background to provide context, and the courage to take on the challenging task."

--Los Angeles Times

From the Back Cover

The New York Times:

Before the Food Arrives on Your Plate, So Much Goes on Behind the Scenes
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: February 20, 2012
One of the first things to like about Tracie McMillan, the author of "The American Way of Eating," is her forthrightness. She's a blue-collar girl who grew up eating a lot of Tuna Helper and Ortega Taco Dinners because her mother was gravely ill for a decade, and her father, who sold lawn equipment, had little time to cook. About these box meals, she says, "I liked them."

Expensive food that took time to prepare "wasn't for people like us," she writes. "It was for the people my grandmother described, with equal parts envy and derision, as fancy; my father's word was snob. And I wasn't about to be like that." This is a voice the food world needs.

Ms. McMillan, like a lot of us, has grown to take an interest in fresh, well-prepared food. She's written forSaveur magazine, a pretty fancy journal, and she knows her way around a kitchen. But her central concern, in her journalism and in this provocative book, is food and class. She stares at America's bounty, noting that so few seem able to share in it fully, and she asks: "What would it take for us all to eat well?"

The title of Ms. McMillan's book pays fealty to Jessica Mitford's classic of English nonfiction prose, "The American Way of Death" (1963). Ms. McMillan's sentences don't have Mitford's high style -- they're a pile of leeks, not shallots -- but both books traffic in dark humor. Standing in a Walmart, where she has taken a minimum-wage job, Ms. McMillan observes that its "produce section is nothing less than an expansive life-support system." Most days, when it comes to vegetables, she's putting lipstick on corpses.

The book Ms. McMillan's most resembles is Barbara Ehrenreich's best seller "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001). Like Ms. Ehrenreich, Ms. McMillan goes undercover amid this country's working poor. She takes jobs picking grapes, peaches and garlic in California; stocking produce in a Walmart in Detroit; and working in a busy Applebee's in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. She tries, and often fails, to live on only the money she earns.

The news Ms. McMillan brings about life on the front lines is mostly grim. In the California fields, where she is the only gringa, she makes far less than minimum wage, sometimes as little as $26 for nine hours of back-breaking work. She lives in cockroach-filled houses, all she can afford, with more than a dozen other people. She delivers a brutal takedown of corporations that, in her view, pretend on their sunny Web sites to treat workers well but in practice use labor contractors that often cheat them. She names names. Here's looking at you, the Garlic Company in Bakersfield, Calif.

She charts the toll this work takes on people's health. "My thighs look as though they've been attacked by an enraged but weaponless toddler," she writes after a day of garlic picking. "My hands, swollen and inundated with blisters the first few days, have acclimatized, but there's a worrisome pain shooting up my right arm." She develops a sprain, which forces her to miss work and ultimately quit. Other workers, she notes, would not have that option.

Among this book's central points is that food workers are, in terms of money and time, among the least able to eat well in America. Most are too exhausted to cook. "By the time I finish my stint at Applebee's," Ms. McMillan says, "I'll have learned how to spot the other members of my tribe on the subway: heavy-lidded eyes, blank stares, black pants specked with grease, hard-soled black shoes."

Ms. McMillan's chapters about Walmart and Applebee's are the book's best. She is not a slash-and-burn critic of either company: both provide needed jobs and treat their employees at least moderately well. But you will steer clear of both places after reading about her travails.

The produce sold at the Walmart where she works is second-rate, often slimy, mushy or merely bland. "Walmart doesn't always have the freshest stuff," one manager says to her. "That's how we keep th

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; 1st edition (February 21, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1439171955
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439171950
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 240 ratings

About the author

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Tracie McMillan

Tracie McMillan

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Tracie McMillan’s investigative and narrative journalism about America’s multiracial working class has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Geographic.

Her work has won wide recognition, from Investigative Reporters and Editors to the James Beard Foundation, and her 2012 bestseller, The American Way of Eating, won a Hillman Book Prize for Journalism and a Books for a Better Life Award. In 2013 she was a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. In 2023, she began editing coverage of worker organizing for the award-winning news site, Capital & Main.

She splits her time between Detroit, Michigan, and Brooklyn, New York.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
240 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

O. Merce Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Adventure--A Woman's Journey Into What & Who Is Behind Our Food, How This Affects Us, Why We Should Care
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2012
Verified Purchase
*****
The book reads like a novel, this first person account of the author's undercover journey into the world of the working poor in the food industry. The author is a remarkable storyteller, recounting all aspects of her adventure in a way that makes you feel like you are entering into her world and joining her and the other workers at each place she is employed. She covers what it felt like, how it was to live and work under harsh conditions, where she lived, the friends she made, the choices she was faced with by living on such a small amount of money. It is fascinating to be able to feel immersed in a world that perhaps few of us would voluntarily enter into, but that many of us find ourselves.

The author spends time harvesting grapes with Hispanic farm workers, harvesting peaches, cutting and gleaning garlic, working at Walmart (including in the produce department), and working at Applebee's. During this time the work is grueling--she gets injured and suffers heatstroke, experiences identity theft, and even is sexually assaulted. She is also taken advantage of repeatedly by her employers in so many creative ways that it's mind-boggling. The reader comes to understand and empathize with workers trapped in low-level jobs and see how hard it becomes to fight back and/or to move beyond a daily existence.

But this is not really just a memoir of an undercover adventure. It is another book as well, an important social commentary. It is not just about one woman's journey, but it is about our food supply. How it works, what drives it. How, "It is far easier to eat well in American than in most of the world but we've done little to ensure that fresh and healthy food is available to everyone." (pg 153) This book explores answers to the questions: "What would it take for us all to eat well?" and "What are the realities of food and eating in America, especially for the working poor?" It answers these important questions literally BY telling the author's story, and helps the reader to see why we all need to care about access to fresh and healthy food--to work for equality in so many areas besides food as well. It shows the reader how many of these social issues are inexorably linked.

For those who enjoy details (as I do) the book is painstakingly footnoted--the notes take up almost 40 pages of very small print. This was a good way to organize the book, as those who are interested can read every footnote of supporting information (as I did), whereas those who just want a good story can easily avoid all of the detailed information.

If you are interested in this topic at all, you will not regret reading this book. To find out more before buying, you can google the book's title and find the author's book web site; the book also has a Facebook page that you can find by searching for the title on Facebook.

Highly recommended.
*****
113 people found this helpful
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John Williamson
4.0 out of 5 stars Forthright food journalism, "cockroach in the deli" and all...
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2012
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I first read about journalist Tracie McMillan's debut book  The American Way of Eating  in a New York Times review by literary critic and author Dwight Garner on February 20th, 2012. He had opened his review with this: "One of the first things to like about Tracie McMillan, the author of 'The American Way of Eating,' is her forthrightness. She's a blue-collar girl who grew up eating a lot of Tuna Helper and Ortega Taco Dinners because her mother was gravely ill for a decade, and her father, who sold lawn equipment, had little time to cook. About these box meals, she says, 'I liked them.'"

This interested me, as I've been following articles about food and its sources for some time, so it was worth a closer look. I had read and enjoyed Garner's witty and informative 2009 book  Read Me , so when he closed his review with this comment, I was further intrigued: "By the end of `The American Way of Eating,' the author ties so many strands of argument together that you'll begin to agree with one of the cooks at Applebee's, who declares about her in awe: 'You see that white girl work? Damn, she can work.'"

Author McMillan's book begins with a few paragraphs explaining that her book is "a work of journalism," and that she had gone undercover to write it, choosing to work side by side with the people involved in various aspects of what we look at as the food industry in America today. Her introduction begins with this somewhat jolting statement, and it's one that made this reader sit up and take notice, wondering if her book was going to be some vegan manifesto against anything that had to do with meat: "The first Brooklyn supermarket I ever walked into had a cockroach in the deli. Not one of those stealthy critters stealing along the crevices in the floor, or hanging out backstage in dry storage. No, this was a proud-to-be-here New York City roach, crawling openly up the wall's white tile before dropping, unceremoniously, onto the meat slicer below. I decided to skip the lunchmeat and headed for the produce aisle."

My initial suspicions were quickly alleviated, as this book is an actual first-hand exploration, one that took the author to jobs such as picking grapes and peaches in the California fields, then moving on to cutting and gleaning garlic, working right beside the other farmworkers, most of whom she converses with in Spanish, the only gringa, and one making well under minimum wage. This is for nine hours of grueling and physically exhausting work. And in all of this, she's working with the people that she encounters, not standing aside with public relations people and repeating the media hype that is seen in advertisements. She lives with these people, discussing their kids, doctor visits, food... in short all of the things that regular people discuss with their coworkers in almost any field of work in America.

From those California fields, author McMillan moves on in Part II to Michigan for a stint working at Wal-Mart, which it turns out, has become the "largest grocer in both the U.S. and the world." Her in-depth observations are both fascinating and revealing, especially since Wal-Mart, founded in 1962, didn't really get into food until the 1980s. While she's describing her experiences working side by side with other employees there, she interleaves the paragraphs with hard facts about how large Wal-Mart is in our American food chain, and she backs it up with extensive footnotes.

Part III takes us to the cooking of food, and here she starts as a kitchen novice at Applebee's in Brooklyn, NY. There are over twenty Applebee's restaurants in New York City, and McMillan was trying to get a kitchen job in food preparation with the chain. This was one of the more fascinating sections of the book, though there's an unsettling part, which results in the author being assaulted (and not by a work colleague) after the get-together following her last night at Applebee's, a place that she had openly enjoyed the work.

Each of the book sections starts by listing how much she earned picking, producing or handling food and how much was spent on what she ate, both percentagewise and in terms of annualized salary. Some of these numbers can be quite sobering in terms of comparative living in this country today, and wondering where we may be headed.

It's all too easy to compare this book with cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich's bestselling  Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America , and in that comparison, both Ehrenreich and McMillan have gone undercover among the working people of America. Having read both, this reader found more depth in Ms. McMillan offering, but perhaps that's due to the difference in the fact that self-proclaimed "myth buster" Ehrenreich seems to dwell on class struggles. McMillan's working family background offers a more three-dimensional feel to the people and the situations that she encountered.

But there were times that she seemed to be reluctant to get too close or reveal what she was feeling about those with whom she was involved during her work. That may be a subjective observation on this reader's point, but there were times that I found myself waiting for the author to indeed open up with the emotions that she was surely feeling just below the surface, yet so often it went 80% there... and stopped.

It should be noted that Ms. McMillan's extensive footnotes sprinkled throughout this book are surprising in both their depth and their accuracy. This reader spent quite a few hours bouncing between the Kindle and the computer looking at some of the sources that she had listed, and it became clear that she had really done her homework. Her appendix entitled "Cheap Food?" is intriguing, and worth the time to read, and her wide-ranging bibliography could make food reading into quite a project for those so interested. This reader has already bookmarked a number of her sources for more in-depth reading.

There are some holes here and there in this book, but without making excuses on behalf of the author, that's to be expected in any journalistic work such as this. All questions and answers cannot possibly be put into a book such as this without either making it completely boring or dull, and in this author McMillan has succeeded quite well. What stands out is that this is a good read, and often moving on much like a novel, with dialogue that makes one wonder what's coming next.

As a debut offering, this reader is impressed with the depth that Tracie McMillan has gone into with this book. If you're at all interested in food, where it comes from and how it's handled, this book is a solidly recommended 4-star read, and a worthwhile look at the actual politics involved in food policy in America today. I'll be looking forward to what she comes up with next.

3/11/2012
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John Toti
5.0 out of 5 stars Still holds water today
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2024
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I appreciate the effort and commitment that went into this book. Having worked in the industry, I'm willing to bet the author was holding back may issues that she encountered in her three areas of investigation especially in Applebee's and Wally-Mart.! She is fair throughout the book and looks at issues from all sides, even Ted Nugent's point of view is taken into consideration. Well done. Thank you
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