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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The Paradoxical Relationship Between Supply and Access
The contradiction between the abundance of food and the barriers America’s poorest citizens face in eating healthily is as old as America itself. In the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson observed that while the rich produced more fruits and vegetables than they could possibly consume, the poor subsisted on a “milk and animal diet” (10).
More than 200 years later, many Americans struggle with scarce nutrition. According to 2017 research by the US Department of Agriculture, roughly 15 million households are food insecure, meaning they lack access to adequate food. Nearly 40% of Americans are obese, often because of an unhealthy diet—and yet the country’s farm fields, supermarket storerooms, and produce wholesale markets are filled with fruits and vegetables. In not bridging this divide, McMillan argues, America is failing to live up to its basic promise as a land of plenty.
This theme manifests repeatedly in McMillan’s own experience. Working in California’s Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world—producing 8% of US agricultural output, in terms of value—McMillan is constantly hungry. This paradox is also evident in the low wages paid to McMillan and her fellow fieldworkers, which are often much less than minimum wage, despite the fact that the crops grown in the Central Valley are worth an estimated $17 billion—and despite the fact that farm wages are only about six cents worth of every dollar spent on produce, suggesting that increasing laborers’ wages would have little effect on overall price.
McMillan observes the same dynamics at work at Walmart; even though Walmart’s 2018 revenue was nearly $10 billion, part-time, minimum wage workers like McMillan barely make enough to cover their bills, and in particular, have to go forego healthy food. Meanwhile, McMillan observes extensive food waste in the produce sections and storerooms of the Walmart where she works. This situation highlights how the economies of scale that make Walmart competitive don’t apply to produce: Since it can spoil, there’s no benefit to being able to buy it in bulk.
These issues also point to a possible solution to the paradoxical relationship between supply and access: eschewing the complex networks currently responsible for the distribution of food in favor of a more direct relationship between food producers and consumers, as is evident in the small urban farms of Detroit. If alternatives are not found, widening inequality threatens to make the disparity in access to healthy food worse, even as the American food system spreads to more parts of the globe.
The Complexity of Reasons Why People Don’t Eat Healthily
To look at many of the campaigns promoting healthy eating, one might think that deciding whether or not to eat healthily is entirely a matter of choice. This is echoed in the widespread perception that poor people prefer junk food, while more affluent families fill their plates with fresh, healthy meals. McMillan explores how the factors that influence people’s diets are complex and go beyond palate.
Throughout the book, McMillan documents her wages. Each tally not only illustrates how poorly paid many of the jobs in food production and distribution are but also underscores how those jobs don’t pay enough to ensure people can afford healthy food. Wages aren’t the only factor. Working long hours in exhausting conditions limits people’s ability and willingness to cook for themselves, a consequence McMillan observes in her own experience, as the demanding nature of field labor and work in an Applebee’s kitchen causes her to lose interest in preparing food. In this formulation, it’s not just money that gives people the freedom to make choices about what they eat; it’s also the time and energy people have at the end of their day to prepare a healthy meal.
A factor McMillan returns to repeatedly throughout the book is the role of culinary education. McMillan learned to cook from her grandmother, but that experience is increasingly anomalous; many Americans now report having less cooking knowledge than their mothers and grandmothers. Programs that counter this loss of knowledge emerge in the book as an important way to bring about behavioral change, from the young woman McMillan discusses in the introduction who took a cooking class and learned to love vegetables (even if they were often out of her budget), to the sisters McMillan encounters at Detroit’s Eastern Market who traveled 30 miles to take advantage of a program that offered extra money for produce on top of food stamps, and suggested cooking classes as a way to boost demand for healthy food. Equipping people with culinary knowledge could make it easier for them to opt for healthy meals.
The Privatization of Food Production and Distribution
Throughout the book, McMillan identifies cooking and eating as central to who we are as a species: She cites research that suggests the discovery of cooking drove the evolution of Homo sapiens and describes eating as a social act, both because of its communal nature and because of the complex human relationships that go into producing food. Even more fundamentally, McMillan writes, “everybody eats.”
Despite the universal need for healthy food, McMillan argues it has not been treated as an essential service in the United States:
When we build a new city, the public sector works to make sure that certain needs are met safely and affordably: roads, water, electricity, telephones. But, for reasons that are just beginning to be publicly questioned, America has traditionally done nothing to make sure there is also food in that new city (12).
This description applies not just to new cities but also to older ones, such as Detroit, where for many years there were no national supermarket chains in the urban core.
The dependence on grocery stores is itself part of the problem, according to McMillan. Walmart already provides nearly a quarter of the nation’s grocery supply. This is echoed in the consolidation of agricultural activity in a small number of industrial producers and the outsourcing of food production to chains like Applebee’s. By tracing the developments in the 20th century that made this industrialization possible, from cultural changes like the move to the suburbs to legislative changes like the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982—which allowed farms of up to 960 acres, and in some cases more, to have access to irrigation—McMillan shows how the current structure is highly artificial: “To walk through Walmart’s cavernous aisles is to walk through a landscape created by a century’s worth of decisions America has made about its food” (153).
The consequence of this state of affairs isn’t just farming practices that use land less efficiently, taking a greater toll on the soil and producing greater carbon emissions; or that people consume meals that are higher in salt and sugar and contain less fresh produce. Fundamentally, it deprives people of the opportunity to exert control over what they eat. As Walmart accrues more market share and has less competition, there’s a risk that leaving this up to the private market could cause prices could rise, putting healthy food even more out of people’s reach.
