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    The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table
    The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table
    The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table
    Audiobook10 hours

    The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table

    Written by Tracie McMillan

    Narrated by Hillary Huber

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    About this audiobook

    What if you can't afford nine-dollar tomatoes? That was the question award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan couldn't escape as she watched the debate about America's meals unfold, one that urges us to pay food's true cost-which is to say, pay more. So in 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters.From the fields of California, a Walmart produce aisle outside of Detroit, and the kitchen of a New York City Applebee's, McMillan takes us into the heart of America's meals. With startling intimacy she portrays the lives and food of Mexican garlic crews, Midwestern produce managers, and Caribbean line cooks, while also chronicling her own attempts to live and eat on meager wages. Along the way, she asked the questions still facing America a decade after the declaration of an obesity epidemic: Why do we eat the way we do? And how can we change it? To find out, McMillan goes beyond the food on her plate to examine the national priorities that put it there. With her absorbing blend of riveting narrative and formidable investigative reporting, McMillan takes us from dusty fields to clanging restaurant kitchens, linking her work to the quality of our meals-and always placing her observations in the context of America's approach not just to farms and kitchens but to wages and work.The surprising answers that McMillan found on her journey have profound implications for our food and agriculture, and also for how we see ourselves as a nation. Through stunning reportage, Tracie McMillan makes the simple case that-city or country, rich or poor-everyone wants good food. Fearlessly reported and beautifully written, The American Way of Eating goes beyond statistics and culture wars to deliver a book that is fiercely intelligent and compulsively readable. Talking about dinner will never be the same again.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 30, 2012
    ISBN9781452677538
    Author

    Tracie McMillan

    A working-class transplant from rural Michigan, Brooklyn-based writer Tracie McMillan has written about food and class for a variety of publications including, The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Magazine; Saveur; and Slate. After putting herself through New York University, she began reporting and from 2001 to 2005 she was the managing editor of the award-winning magazine City Limits. There, she won recognition from organizations ranging from the James Beard Foundation to World Hunger Year. Follow her at TracieMcMillan.com or @TMMcMillan.

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    Reviews for The American Way of Eating

    4/5

    34 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      slightly misleading title/book trying to do too many things at once, interesting experience
    • 5/5
      What a smart, engrossing book! Answers the questions that don't get asked enough about where our food comes from and why. The personal take on the whole process is rendered beautifully. Thanks, Tracie McMillan.
    • 4/5
      If reading McMillan's description of the conversation between a self-described "foodie" and a working class woman talking about the care her grandmother took with food doesn't open your eyes to the class divide nothing will. While comparisons to Nickle and Dimed are impossible to ignore, McMillan manages to take the American middle and upper class obsession with food and turn it on its head.
    • 5/5
      Investigative journalism and analysis. In the brief conclusion she discusses new business models for a new food system.
    • 2/5
      important topic, but plenty of words and a few real content.
    • 4/5
      McMillan goes undercover to pick produce in central California, work at Walmart in Detroit and in the kitchen of a New York City Applebee's. Her goal is to find out what it takes to get the fruits and vegetables on the table of the average American, while learning how corporations get their stock, how difficult it is for their low-paid employees to get by and how a chain restaurant prepares the customer's meal.While not scary like Fast Food Nation, but McMillan gives plenty of info the average person doesn't even consider. Like where does a garlic company get its product when the California season is over, what does Walmart do about pest-control and how can a restaurant bring you a steak dinner in 14 minutes? An interesting look at the (mostly) produce side of what we eat.
    • 3/5
      One of the reasons I ended up reading this book was that there was a blurb by Rush Limbaugh on the back that says, "Every time I find evidence of a massive forthcoming event to take away...our freedom...I am going to warn you about it...And so now we have a book by...Tracie McMillan...What is it with all of these young single white women, overeducated - doesn't mean intelligent." How could I not read this book? Good job marketing team.As to the book itself, it was alright. There was a lot of interesting information and research, and I did like that we got to get a more inside look into these areas of food production and distribution, however, I feel that the combination of research and personal undercover experience didn't mesh well a lot of the time. There were many times when the personal narrative would be broken by a large chunk of facts and statistics that I feel would have been better received and impactful if they were woven into the narrative.While I felt it was admirable that she attempted to truly live with the same restrictions of income as those she was working with, there were times when I feel that she failed to take into account her privilege. This was mostly evident when she was working (more attempting to work) as a farm hand. She was often times incredibly lucky when it came to housing since she had friends she could fall back on and a bank account that she could access when in desperate need. Therefore, there were times when she concluded that she could splurge on something since she had that back-up. This wouldn't normally bother me, but she tried to play these sections off as if she were really living like those whose lives depend on these jobs when she really wasn't. Don't claim that you truly put yourself in this situation when you're actually willing to reach outside of it when in trouble. That's not how these people's lives work, and if you're going to say that you lived like the poor of this country do, then you better do it. Don't use your sister's annoyance with you for not being able to afford to bake cookies for a party as an excuse to dip into your actually ample savings. I believe the only real time she brought into account her privileges was when she would reflect on the fact that she could leave at anytime and be fine but those she worked with could not since they depended on this work to feed themselves and their families. Granted, there were a couple times when she actually used this privilege and just left a job (i.e. ending her stint with Walmart).While I appreciate what McMillan was trying to do with this book, I thought that her undercover work was sub par, and she didn't do a great job on combining the research with narrative. However, the research was really great, and I learned a lot from these sections. Maybe if she had kept to writing down the research this book would have had a higher rating. In conclusion: Informative but could have been better.
    • 4/5
      Really 4 1/2 stars. Along the lines of Nickeled and Dimed, but less doctrinaire. A very engaging read that will make you think about where your food comes from.
    • 4/5
      Tracie decided to work in 3 major areas of the food industry in the US and write about them. She worked in the fields picking fruits and vegetables, in the produce section of a Wal-Mart and in an Applebees restaurant - all undercover as a reporter. I think it would have added another interesting dimension if she had also worked in a food processing company like Kraft, and perhaps at a dairy farm or cattle ranch or meat processing plant, since those are also major parts of our food industry.In memoir fashion, with informative footnotes, Tracie tells how she picked grapes and garlic in California, worked at Wal-Marts in Michigan and New York and worked at an Applebees in New York. I learned more from the informative footnotes than from her memoir, but the book is well-written and interesting and entertaining. I was saddened, but not suprised to read about the children who sometimes work in the fields picking produce, the injuries caused by the repetitive motion, and the low pay and re-writing of pay records to make it look like they are paying the produce workers fairly. I was suprised and saddened to learn that for the workers, picking organic produce is just the same as any other produce. I think that we would like to think that "organic" means not only a lack of pesticide, but that the entire process would be kinder and gentler and healthier and more fair and that the workers would get higher pay since the produce itself costs more, but that is not the case. Tracie includes facts about the grocery industry and how it grew quickly once it created it's own distribution system and how Wal-Mart's low prices can be deceiving since the low prices of the loss leaders are made up by higher prices elsewhere in their stores. She points out that at both Wal-Mart and at Applebees, there is supposed to be training for the employees and at some point they are asked to sign papers stating that they received training that they did not actually receive. That does not suprise me at all since I work in retail and have had that happen to me in the past too. Everyone signs that because if you don't, you won't have a job.I found it very unappetising and rather disgusting to learn that most of the foods at Applebees are pre-prepared and made from packaged mixes and later heated in a microwave in plastic baggies before being served to the customers. Tracie includes information about CSAs and bemoans the fact that in our country we make sure that people have access to electricity, water and to some extent even health care, but we do not put any effort into making sure that fresh, healthy food is readily available to everyone everywhere, instead, we leave that to the private industries and corporations like Wal-Mart.
    • 4/5
      "The American Way of Eating" (AWE) was a worthwhile read, despite the book's kind of goofy subtitle "Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields, and the Dinner Table." It is to Tracie McMillan's credit that she carefully investigated, by means of personal albeit temporary immersion, reasons why access to good-tasting, nutritious food is so elusive to many. Her reportage on the abysmal wages and work/life conditions of farm workers who harvest crops for literally pennies on the pound was on-point and moving. One can't avoid drawing the conclusion that we "haves" cook and dine on the backs of an undervalued and anonymous underclass. Likewise, McMillan wrote convincingly about the hard lives and dicey future prospects of minimum-wage workers across (but hardly limited to) the food industry. To me, one of the most interesting parts of the book was McMillan's dissection of Detroit's wholesale distribution networks, in which massive amounts of decent food pour into the city's markets and are quickly redistributed to suburban locations. I liked McMillan's approach overall and admired the moxie with which she conducted her research (but "undercover"?...oh please).Yet the root causes which underlie Americans' poor eating habits of Americans are much broader and more complex than the ground which McMillan was able to cover. As much as anything, the problem lies with the marketeers and food scientists responsible for producing and hawking modern junk food and nutrient-challenged convenience fare. As McMillan correctly (I believe) points out, exposing adults and kids alike to good food and actively teaching and helping them to obtain better food outcomes is a critical task. Inculcating better eating habits needs to occur relentlessly and in a myriad of different forms, in the same way that anti-smoking campaigns have become a permanent fixture of modern culture.
    • 2/5
      Ms. McMillan decided to explore how food works in the U.S. To do this, she took a decidedly Barbara Ehrenreich approach: she went out and worked in the field. Literally. She chose to seek work in the California central valley as a farm worker, in Michigan as a Wal-Mart supercenter grocery employee, and as a cook at Applebee’s in Brooklyn, New York. She allowed herself a small cushion of funds with each new job to help with finding a place to live in her new cities, but if she ran out, she did what people who don’t have nest eggs to pull from: she took out an advance on her credit card, or just did without.

      Each section starts out with a page that lists her hourly earnings, what that would translate to weekly and annually after taxes, as well as what percentage she spent on food, broken down by eating out and cooking at home. As expected, the work she did was hard, the money she earned was ridiculous, and in many cases it was just easier to eat shitty food than to find the money or energy to cook well.

      Some of the author’s observations are quite interesting and good to see; her main take-away is that healthy eating isn’t just about the availability of fresh food, as so many campaigns want us to believe (have you had that ‘food desert’ ad, featuring two kids, in an endless loop on Hulu like I have? I now loathe that ad). It’s also about having a solid education in how to cook (which so many of us don’t), a job that provides the wages AND the time and energy to do that cooking, and a supportive public system like adequate healthcare and child care to allow people to cook instead of eating out.

      From my perspective, the most surprising thing was how little cooking actually happens at a restaurant like Applebee’s. I spent one summer working as a hostess and busser at a local restaurant, and other than the giant vat of butter we kept cooling in a sink from which we would scoop a dish to bring out to the fancy tables, everything appeared to be cooked and prepared in the kitchen. Not so with Applebee’s. Yikes.

      This book is written pretty well. She manages to weave in statistics and other information in well, and I found her sections on Wal-Mart and the private food supply chain to be very interesting. However, and I knew this going into reading the book – why did SHE need to tell this story? A college-educated, white woman? Come on. Couldn’t she have actually interviewed people who had their own stories to tell? I mean, obviously she did do that to a degree, but this was the Tracie McMillan story, and it absolutely did not have to be. I mean, at one point she is hired on part-time at a Wal-Mart outside of Detroit, and all I could think was that she was taking a job away from someone who actually needed it. I couldn’t get over it, and I don’t necessarily think this book needed to be written in this way. I’m not recommending it, mostly because I think there are a lot of other, better ways to learn about these industries, that don’t involve taking jobs away from people who need them, or replacing the voices of poor people, many of whom are people of color, with the voice of a middle-class white woman.
    • 5/5
      Very readable---full of information beyond what is in the actual story of her experiences. There are no easy answers to the problems of feeding the world but her last chapter sums up what we should be as a society of human beings. Her extra notes on the pages throughout the book were impressive and added to the accuracy of the picture she presented. The question is, how do we get there from here, as fast as possible.
    • 3/5
      There's a lot of information here, much of it new to me. I knew, f'rinstance, that most people in the US have abysmal diets. I wasn't clear on some of the reasons why- including the fact that lots of people just plain never learn to cook from scratch and are flummoxed by a pile of ingredients with no instructions attached. This book also reinforced my resolve to never shop in Walmart or eat in chain restaurants.

      I enjoyed McMillan's writing style, which was journalistic without being impersonal. Lots of footnotes and research to back up the personal anecdotes, too.

    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed the authors immersive experiences. She illuminated issues I was already familiar with but in a very personal way due to her going under cover.
    • 4/5
      An extensively researched and frequently disturbing look at the food industry in America, from the farms where it is grow to the supermarkets where it's sold to the restaurants where it's prepared and consumed. McMillan worked in all three of these areas as part of her research which make her observations all the more insightful and interesting. After reading this, I'm glad I don't eat at Applebee's or shop at Wal-Mart, and I'm grateful to be in a position to be able to have the access to and afford food that many Americans cannot.