A review by bookwormmichelle
The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan

4.0

I liked this a LOT more than I thought I would after hearing it compared to Nickel and Dimed. It's nowhere near as much political screed and a lot more actual description and experience than Eihrenreich seems able to do. The author, a 32 year old college educated white woman, worked "undercover" (without telling most people she was a journalist) at various produce farms in California, Wal-Marts in Michigan, and an Applebee's in New York City. She also tried to get along and live within her income. She was pretty much adopted by the workers she spent time with, who helped her to get along and feed herself and find places to live in her various stops. She describes quite well the difficult lives of the people she meets--and it's true, minimum-wage workers and migrant farm workers have very tough lives. She even gets injured on the job, cutting garlic in California, and gets heat exhaustion at another place, and she knows full well just how lucky she is to be able to just stop and leave. She brings up a number of good points about Americans, the food we eat, and the way we grow and distribute that food, and she's right--it IS much harder to find good fresh food on a meager salary in inner cities. McMillan does occasionally venture into territory that necessitates our finding out she isn't exactly terribly economically literate--she keeps saying that farmworkers need to be paid more, but that produce prices should be lower, and her only vague ideas to make those two rather incompatible goals work out is that there should be less money going to middlemen/distributors and less monopolistic distribution (meaning, apparently, get rid of Wal-mart and everything will be OK.) She also several times points out that the French pay more for their food than we do, but that doesn't mean they LIKE food more, because they are so lucky as to have a government that pays for like almost everything else--and she never mentions that SOMEONE has to pay for all those goodies, and that France in fact DOES pay, in a sluggish economy, one of the highest unemployment rates in the EC, and ginormous government debt and high taxes. Sigh. So this isn't great economics. But it IS good experiential reporting, and I'll never look at the produce bin at Walmart or an appetizer trio at Applebee's in quite the same way again. One of MacMillan's best points is that many lower income Americans might WANT to buy fresher food, but it is difficult to find and buy it, and also we've lost a lot of the knowledge of how to COOK it. This is so true. It's really hard to know what to do with that kohlrabi if you've never cooked it before. I know a young woman who grew a garden and donated the produce to our local homeless shelter, but the residents there, and even the staff working there, had NO idea how to prepare it, so she had to teach them how to cook with it. Food preparation education would certainly help, but she seems to want public schools to do that, and they really don't seem able to handle what we've already given them to do, let alone give them more responsibilities. She also lauds Michelle Obama's campaign to get better, healthier food available in cities, but barely mentions that one of the "star" grocery chains lining up to go there is Wal-Mart. And she doesn't really mention that one of the best ways to improve the lives of the migrant farm workers would be to change our totally insane immigration system to allow freer movement and legal status for the farmworker population. Good, solid and very interesting book!