39 pages • 1 hour read
Tracie McMillanThe American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Timecards
Timecards characterize the experience of those working on the lowest rungs of the American food system, and they’re seldom accompanied by good news. Despite the air of formality that timecards give to field labor, they’re subject to reinterpretation by employers, and timecards and paychecks often depict a different reality: a timecard that shows a nine-hour day at a piece rate equivalent to $16 for that day will end up as a paycheck of two hours at minimum wage. This “curious accounting” isn’t simply exploitative but also obscures how poorly paid agricultural work is, precluding a serious investigation of the fairness of the system. Before McMillan embarks on her investigation, she assumes many of these exploitive practices—such as employers rounding down the weight of buckets of harvested produce—have stopped, an ignorance that points to the broader lack of knowledge about food production.
Throughout the book, timecards emerge as the dividing line between stability and catastrophe. At one point, McMillan receives a paycheck that’s six hours fewer than expected; the difference is enough to leave her unable to pay basic expenses, and she takes the costly step of taking out a cash advance on her credit card. Later, that experience is repeated while working for Applebee’s, where her low salary—which she realizes is lower than the rate she’d been promised—combined with a fraudulent withdrawal from her bank account prompts her to take out another advance. By focusing on timecards throughout the book, McMillan also highlights a reason why people in poverty often don’t eat well: when people are one unanticipated expense or curiously interpreted timecard away from ruin, healthy food is the least of their concerns.
Boxed Meals
Boxed meals provide much of the structure of the book: They shape McMillan’s own upbringing; they influence how a corporation like Walmart lays out its stores, both financially and geographically; and they’re fundamental to how a restaurant chain like Applebee’s works.
Processed meals occupy a central place in the American diet. Their potential risks aside, boxed meals aren’t particularly useful when it comes to saving money or time, McMillan argues. To cook a meal of pasta and ground beef from scratch takes about the same as making the same dish using Hamburger Helper, with the former taking slightly more active cooking time. These meals do serve a function, however, by eliminating the need to plan meals: “The real convenience behind these convenience foods isn’t time or money, but that they remove one more bit of stress from our day” (212).
Processed foods explain the evolution of the American food system. They facilitated the evolution of large supermarkets by allowing them to purchase food in bulk, taking advantage of economies of scale, and opening up opportunities for “loss-leading”—pricing some items at a loss to lure shoppers in, while generating a profit on items like cookie mixes and boxed mashed potatoes. Without the restaurant equivalent of boxed meals—standardized ingredients prepared by a central food purchasing arm—a restaurant chain like Applebee’s, where diners can have an identical experience anywhere in the country, would not be possible.
The through line of boxed meals helps explain how the American food system evolved and underscores the manufactured nature of that system. Rather than illustrating something intrinsic about the alimentary preferences of lower-class Americans, the widespread use of boxed meals shows that citizens’ access to healthy foods has been left up to corporations, which encourage consumers to eat processed food for the sake of profit, and to citizens themselves, who in the absence of adequate time, money, or culinary education, often go with the easiest option.
Food Safety Training
The absence of food safety training for those working in many aspects of the food system is an issue McMillan encounters personally in her investigation, but this lack also highlights a bigger issue: the haphazard way America distributes food to its citizens.
Initially, McMillan observes this lack of oversight with food safety in the fields; at one point, she’s startled to note the lubricant she’s using to oil her shears for garlic cutting comes with a warning to avoid contact with food. At no point in her tenure in the fields does she receive any training in this regard, a deficiency in oversight that’s echoed in everything from the lack of enforcement to ensure workers are properly paid to the regular flouting of regulations around pesticide use designed to protect workers in the fields from being exposed to chemicals.
In restaurants, too, food safety training “may be considered optional” (234). This reflects a drive among restaurants to cut corners for the sake of profit. This imperative is on display in other practices, such as the failure to pay workers for mandatory training, a phenomenon described by researchers as “partial nonpayment.” In the case of Applebee’s, the lack of food safety also underscores how little cooking actually takes place in the kitchen—many dishes simply require the staff to turn on the microwave or add water. As people come to play less of an active role in selecting and preparing their food, their ability to do so safely becomes less relevant.
The only place McMillan does receive food safety training is while preparing to work in the produce department at Walmart, which given McMillan’s experience, may show more about Walmart’s identity as a corporate behemoth with standardized training practices and a fear of being fined for not following the law. In McMillan’s case, her manager seems to possess little specialized training, despite the fact he’s responsible for the produce supply of much of the community—suggesting that not only do large corporations like Walmart not see healthy food as a human right, as McMillan makes a case for in the book’s conclusion, but they also see fresh food as analogous to any other product that can generate profit.
