Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Book Review: The American Way of Eating

Book Title: The American Way of Eating

Author: Tracie McMillan

Date: 2012

Publisher: Scribner (Simon & Schuster)

Length: 318 pages including copious notes, bibliography, and index

ISBN: 1439171955

Quote: "This is a work of journalism, and an undercover one at that...As a worker, I had a lot of advantages: good health, health insurance, education, a cat, citizenship, the knowledge that this particular struggle would end in two months. As such, I can make no claim to having had an 'authentic' experience. But I can tell you what I saw."

In order to understand more about the food industry in the United States, McMillan took jobs picking fruit and vegetables, stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, and cooking at Applebee's.

What everybody loves about this book, going by the Amazon reviews, is the vividness with which she tells us what she saw on those jobs.

As a farm laborer, McMillan was disastrous. Co-workers were kind--no race hate, she was a sort of mascot on each farm that hired her, although admittedly several farms wouldn't consider her--but she succumbed to heat sickness, muscle cramps, food poisoning, and barely managed to stumble around job sites long enough to document how her working hours were misreported. Farms in California had the right to pay by the piece rather than by the hour, but, probably in order to justify the continued employment of less productive laborers, e.g. McMillan, her employers misreported her ten-hour days as two-hour shifts so that her low wages seemed to reflect a decent hourly wage. She also reports how allegedly organic crops were grown in fields next to chemical-treated crops, and laborers, as well as the allegedly pesticide-free food, were doused with sidestream pesticides.

As a Wal-Mart worker, McMillan was able to make ends meet; her story here is about boredom, unhappiness, awareness that she'd taken a dead-end job. Although she claims to have enjoyed cooking from scratch, before, cooking does not seem to suggest itself to her as a way to relax after work...possibly because it would have reduced the time she had to take all those notes for her book. When invited to bring cookies to a party, she buys a packaged mix rather than trying to create something different and special.

At Applebee's, she was competent, even promotable...although, when she quit, she says that at the farewell party she drank too much, passed out, and was sexually molested. The story here is about how much of the cost of those premium-priced dinners reflects the cost of having everything pre-mixed and shipped around the country, rather than making anything from scratch.

So far so good. Up until the "Conclusion" chapter, we're aware of McMillan's left-wing political views, but mostly we're aware of her as a talented, well-informed writer, apt to throw a discussion of Mesopotamian farming techniques into her description of California fields, or cite Wendell Berry's What Are People For or Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle at any minute...and almost as good a wordsmith as they are.

Then she throws logic out the window and goes into a New Left political rant. "Distributing our food solely through private networks makes sense only if you think of food as a consumer good...[I]f you can change your perspective and see fresh food...[as] a social good and a human right--it makes far more sense to have a little public control over its distribution."

This is excusable if, and only if, she's not aware of the history of food distribution in American cities today. McMillan claims to like the idea of fresh local produce being trucked into city neighborhoods to compete with the overprocessed junkfood sold in big-chain stores and fast-food restaurants. She claims to think that "the rise of suburbia" is what stopped the friendly fruit and vegetable men from driving or pushing their little carts through the cities. She is, in historical fact, wrong. What banished the fruit and vegetable carts was "a little public control," supported by the public out of concerns about food safety, and implemented by politicians who'd received campaign donations from the big-chain stores and fast-food restaurants.

I could prove this, if our government would let me. Lift the restrictions on marketing small farm and garden produce on the sidewalks of a city. Give residents of, say, downtown D.C. access to fresh Chesapeake Bay fish and Anne Arundel corn on the cob, at whatever price they can negotiate with farmers and fishermen who don't have to pay exorbitant fees for government oversight. Hold those who supply healthy food to the city responsible for keeping themselves from doing serious material harm to their customers; prosecute the negligent as the poisoners they are, and leave the honest alone. Dare bets aren't gambling and I'll bet any city that dares to try this any amount they care to ask that, within a year, the fast-food restaurants will be gone. Because nobody's going to buy a Happy Meal when they have equal access to a comparably priced local healthy meal. Fast-food restaurants didn't become really popular until the farmers' carts had been banished from the city streets.

At best McMillan shows herself, in the "Conclusion" chapter, to be more concerned with collaborating with the land and power grabbers than she is with promoting the well-being of laborers, farmers, ghetto residents, suburbanites, or pink-collar laborers. And how much credibility does that cost her? A lot, with me, no matter how many primary documents have been photographed on her web site. The American Way of Eating is still a good read, but it could have been a great book if it didn't have this terrible tragic flaw.

This one's not a Book You Can Buy From Me because it's new. McMillan will still receive her fair share of the price you pay a regular retailer...and, for that reason, some readers might want to borrow this book from a library.

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