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

by Tracie McMillan

Paperback, 2012

Description

"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"--Jacket.

Status

Available

Call number

394.12

Publication

Scribner (2012), Edition: 1, 352 pages

User reviews

LibraryThing member herdingcats
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member Carlie
There is no shortage of films, TV shows or books concerning the current state of America’s food, and I eat them up. My interest in food began in 2001 when I read Fast Food Nation. That is when I realized that fast food wasn’t just bad for individual health, it has detrimental effects on
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agriculture, economics, pollution, ecology, animal health, even social cohesion, and I’m sure I’m missing some. The country has been going down this path of massive-scale agriculture and low-quality food production for over fifty years now, and we may have reached the tipping point.

Unlike Fast Food Nation, McMillan’s American Way of Eating is more about how the food industry affects individuals. She began with the concept of food deserts, areas that have people of low incomes who also have low access to supermarkets or large grocery stores. She decided to drop her life temporarily and live in food deserts while working in three different areas of the food industry – farming, selling, and cooking. She started with a small nest egg in each instance to get started, but then lived only off the wages she earned. She kept track of how much money she made, how much she spend of food, and what percentage of her income was spent on food.

Farming was spent in California’s Central and Salinas Valleys, areas known for food growing despite low water levels that require the need for heavy irrigation. She worked mostly with migrant farm workers who were generous and friendly. She picked grapes, peaches, and garlic working for various farming corporations. She, like the other workers, was grossly underpaid, not just in wage rates, but also in shady accounting. The company would divide her total earned by piece rate and divide it by hourly minimum wage so it appeared on paper that she received adequate compensation for work, but it would only list two hours of work time when she actually put in a full eight hour day. These practices are common in the farming industry, particularly when the majority of workers are migrants.

To get some insight into selling food, McMillan when to the giant – Walmart. She worked in two Walmarts in Michigan; one stocking dry goods and the other stocking produce. The sheer scale in which Walmart is able to operate marks it as a game-changer in the food distribution system. Before mass supermarkets, food was grown regionally and shipped locally. With the advent of large-scale distribution, foods of all types are available in almost any location in America regardless of season. The sacrifice here is quality and surprisingly price. Although Walmart may have some of the lowest prices in town on some things, produce is not one of them. Local grocery stores are actually able to beat out Walmart produce prices and offer higher quality because they have more dexterity in food logistics.

She also discusses urban agriculture, specifically in Detroit. There are two things about Detroit that make growing food in the community both appealing and viable – vacant land and lack of grocery stores. Michigan State University conducted a study in 2010 that found Detroiters could get nearly half of their nontropical fruits and three-quarters of their vegetables from urban growers, and it would require only about 12 percent of the city’s vacant land if biointensive agriculture is used, which most urban farms use already.

Lastly, Macmillan works in a kitchen to get the cooking experience of the food industry. Like her experience selling food, she went to one of the big dogs to learn how to cook it – Applebee’s. Although, I’m not sure cooking would be an apt description. With almost everything, from soups and sauces to mashed potatoes and garlic, coming from pre-made bags shipped from food service vendors. On top of the fact that it was pre-made, it is mostly compiled and cooked in a microwave. They don’t really cook at Applebee’s, they assemble. Applebee’s may have servers and a bar, but there is not much difference between Applebee’s and typical fast food.

When she started out, McMillan wanted to explore what life was like for individuals in the food industry as well as how the working poor ate. It could not be further from true that poor people do not care about the quality, taste, and look of their food. What they lack is time, access, and knowledge. When the food stamp program was extended to allow acceptance at farmers markets, they were used heavily. When grocery stores are available, they are patronized over corner stores. When cooking and nutrition classes are completed, people are more comfortable in the kitchen and are able to create well-balanced, wholesome meals that cost less and are healthier than following directions on a box.
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LibraryThing member satyridae
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member arosoff
I don't think this book is groundbreaking. It gives a lot of information that's available elsewhere and packages it together with a personal narrative. That, however, may make it more useful and accessible. The three part structure works well and helps highlight different phases of now we eat.
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There are a lot of comparisons to Nickel and Dimed, a book that people often love or hate. While I can see the comparison, it's not the same book. There's more focus to her decisions; she's not really pretending that she can show you what it's like to be an immigrant farm worker by doing the job. If anything she's all too conscious of how she's different. Going out and working in the fields is a little bit of a gimmick, but it throws you into it more than just an interview. I think it would have been a less interesting and effective book if she had not gone and reported firsthand.

Overall, I liked this and felt that she did a good job of illustrating the problems with our food system without being overly preachy or elitist in the Mark Bittman "if you have time to watch TV, you have time to cook" mold, or pretending that buying those $9 tomatoes and being a locavore is the solution. This is a systemic problem that is much more complicated than where your tomatoes are grown and whether the fertilizer was organic. Who picks the food at your farmers' market? Do you know? I don't. It's about labor law, immigration, land use policy, corporate structure, logistics, and much more.
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LibraryThing member johnclaydon
Investigative journalism and analysis. In the brief conclusion she discusses new business models for a new food system.
LibraryThing member nyiper
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
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added to the accuracy of the picture she presented. The question is, how do we get there from here, as fast as possible.
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LibraryThing member Sullywriter
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member EpicTale
"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
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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.
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LibraryThing member mstrust
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,
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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.
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LibraryThing member Vantine
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
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manages to take the American middle and upper class obsession with food and turn it on its head.
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LibraryThing member gayla.bassham
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.
LibraryThing member JoanAxthelm
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.
LibraryThing member ASKelmore
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,
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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.
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LibraryThing member sunshine608
I really enjoy reading foodie type books. I love Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan and the like that I even have a label for these type of books. Upon seeing this, I was immediately intrigued but after finishing it I'm left wondering what I was supposed to get out of this.

This book is like Nickle
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and Dimed meets Michael Pollan or Marion Nestle. A journalist goes undercover to follow the produce chain. She starts by working in the fields of California picking garlic,grapes and other American produce staples. She then "follows" the produce to Walmart's in Michigan where she goes undercover to the Walmart world. The book ends with her undercover at Applebees in NYC.

I'm not sure there was anything that was groundbreaking for me. The weakest part of the book for me was Applebees which I just couldn't get into as much as the other two section. I wondered why she choose Apple bees in NYC instead of in staying in Michigan or Middle America. I did enjoy her statements in that section of how Applebes and most causal dining restraints like are pretty much just fancy, marked up Hamburger Helper.

I found the Walmart portion the most interesting and sometimes I lost site that this was supposed to be about produce. The Walmart culture could have been a book in itself. I struggled at times keeping it all together because sometimes it felt like parts didn't flow together seamlessly.

Overall, this provides a very brief overview. It might be good for those newly interested on the subject of American Food Culture mainly because it pretty straight forward in depicting some staples of America- Walmart and Applebes. There was some interesting points and I learned a lot about Walmart's culture and just how many of the farm workers that help feed us are taken advantage of. Very eye opening on those aspects, the rest just reinforced the sad state of American food culture. Regardless, Its a struggle and I'm glad that Ms McMillian portrayed what its like to have to choose between healthy food and food that fits a certain lifestyles ( i.e. based on budget or time concern).
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LibraryThing member Jean_Roberts
I wanted to like this book. Parts were very interesting but I felt there was too much filler, and not enough substance. While it was interesting to find out what goes on behind the scenes at Walmart and Applebees there are better books out there. I did find the section where the author describes
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working at picking onions and peaches fascinating and sad.
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Awards

IRE Awards (Finalist — 2012)
James Beard Foundation Award (Nominee — 2013)
Hillman Prize (Book — 2013)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2012-02

ISBN

1439171963 / 9781439171967
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