Tracie McMillan's Investigative Journey to Examine the Impact of Walmart, Applebee's, and Farm Fields on the American Dinner Table

Alicia Crumpton: Imagine you're a woman interested in food practices in the United States so you go undercover living on what you earn in three sectors: a) working as a migrant worker in California; b) working at Walmart in Michigan; and c) working at an Applebees in New York City. In a nutshell, this is Tracie McMillan's story of these experiences. She stated her interest as: "how food works in our lives, how priorities around health and convenience and cost shift when resources are tight, and what we won't compromise on even when they are" (p. 12).

The thing is - everyone eats. No culture, people group, community, or person is exempt from this fact. McMillan's first hand experiences illuminate and gives voice to the lived experiences of people living at or near minimum wage. She touches on so many interesting topics:
* The historical enculturation of food as 'fast' and the subsequent impact on the way we approach eating, cooking, and nutrition
* The cultural belief that 'foodies' are upper class enlightened souls versus the notion that working classes aren't interested in food. Her personal examples and the way food was used as a part of community and relationships blasted the prior...

United States on Dec 09, 2013

John Williamson: 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...

United States on Mar 12, 2012