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

Chapter 9 has McMillan engaging more directly in food production at Applebee’s, prompting a realization that the packaged, processed food they’re serving is not so different from that she grew up eating. In the opening of the chapter, McMillan trains to work in prep, portioning bags of mashed potatoes and pasta, mixing together bags of veggies, and scooping premade pasta sauce into cups.

The ingredients she’s working with come from a purchasing agent formed by Applebee’s known as Customized Supple Chain Services LLC. Having a purchasing agent in-house saves Applebee’s 3-5% in operating costs, McMillan tells us, but she notes that most restaurants don’t bother to create their own. Instead, many contract with companies like Sysco, a major food service company that supplies independent restaurants, or Sygma, which supplies chains.

The end product of this infrastructure is that very little cooking with fresh ingredients takes place in an Applebee’s kitchen, McMillan notes. Nonetheless, cooking has been hypothesized as existing at the heart of human civilization, most persuasively, for McMillan, in the work of Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham. Wrangham argues that apes’ use of cooking facilitated the transition into humans: With more digestible foods, humans had more time for hunting, boosting the consumption of protein, shrinking the amount of space given to the digestive system, and allowing brains to grow. McMillan explains, “We are cooks by evolutionary design; competence in the kitchen has always been key to our health” (209).

McMillan sees the same principle at work in the Applebee’s kitchen—to maximize calories while reducing the amount of time required to prepare them. The food being prepared at Applebee’s consists of meals that would be relatively easy to make at home, for a fraction of the price; in the case of one steak dish, the cost to a home cook would be 80% less than the same meal bought at Applebee’s. In many cases, making food at home from scratch takes the same amount of time as buying it in a restaurant. What’s different, McMillan says, is the amount of energy required to plan a meal.    

In McMillan’s case, the longer she works at Applebee’s, the less time she spends making her own meals. As a consequence, she comes to rely on the meals she has at work, but even so, she struggles to survive financially. After her first paycheck, she realizes she’s only been paid the minimum wage, $7.25, instead of the $8 an hour she was promised while training. At the close of the chapter, McMillan attends a training to become a “Neighborhood Expert,” training other expediters. Later, she analyzes her timecards and sees she was never paid for that time, noting that research suggests this phenomenon, called “partial nonpayment,” is common in the industry.

McMillan has settled into her role at Applebee’s, and she describes how, unlike the other jobs she’s held in her journey through the American food system, she actually enjoys it. This makes it hard to tell her manager, Freddie, that she has to quit, and she cites the same sick grandmother excuse she’s deployed before.

In her last weeks on the job, McMillan is working while the restaurant undergoes an Applebee’s Operations Assessment to ensure staff members are carrying out their duties according to the specifications of the company’s manuals. Freddie gives McMillan two handouts to study, a general set of questions and one that is particular to her role. Reading the handouts, McMillan realizes she should have been getting food safety training from the outset. On the day of the inspection, a safety tool McMillan has never used—a thermometer to check the temperature of the meat—appear at her stations, and she’s instructed to use it while the inspector is present. At the inspection’s conclusion, having answered all the questions correctly, McMillan is told she could soon be a manager if she sticks with the job.

McMillan describes how the casual, occasionally raunchy patter she’d developed with her colleagues in the kitchen was what she liked best about working at Applebee’s, but that that impression shifted after her last shift, when she was sexually assaulted after celebrating with colleagues. McMillan later finds out a co-worker drugged her drink and that a different man assaulted her while she was unconscious at another co-worker’s house. Eventually, McMillan recovers, recounting her gratitude that without children or a real need to depend on her Applebee’s paycheck, she doesn’t have to go back to the job, unlike many women in a similar position.

At the close of the chapter, McMillan reflects on what it meant to work at Applebee’s and how, as a single woman earning $8 an hour, healthy food was out of her reach, a state of affairs that has as much to do with labor practices and kitchen literacy as it does the availability of food itself. McMillan envisages an America where healthy food is as easy to procure as fast food, “and where, once and for all, we could get past this childish notion that only rich snobs care about their meals, and everyone else is content with box meals” (232). Creating that America, she says, will mean changing more than what’s on people’s plates.

In the conclusion, McMillan sets out a case for why eating should be seen as a social act, not just because social bonds are established in the consumption of it—as they were with the fieldworkers who prepared her elaborate meals before she left California for Michigan—but also because the food system is ultimately populated by people, from farmers to produce managers, all of whom play an important role.

McMillan describes how working in so many jobs in the American food system has shifted her perspectives both on food and on her own lifestyle. Working at Walmart prompted McMillan’s realization of the extent of poverty among white Americans; trying to clip coupons to reduce her food costs while working in the fields in California and finding only options for processed food made her realize how few ways there are to procure produce. This combination of factors makes it hard for people to purchase fruits and vegetables even when they want to: “The demand is there, but the means to exercise it is not,” McMillan says (237).

McMillan points out ways to address this, from universal coupons for fresh produce that are not dependent on income, to cooking classes that are incorporated into public education. She also points to the small-scale, fertilizer-free, urban agriculture practiced in Detroit as a model for how to produce healthier yields that are also easier on those doing the harvesting. Finally, she suggests that a model of food distribution that is not dependent on private networks, like that of Walmart, could help ensure better access to healthy food for all Americans.

McMillan concludes by noting how changing the American way of eating will require addressing widening income inequality, so that those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder will be able to participate directly in the nation’s food system, rather than existing at the margins of it.