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Book: ‘The American Way Of Eating’ Highlights Serious Deficiencies
By Grace Wiltbank
Contributing Writer
• This country has an obesity epidemic because eating poorly is easier than eating well.
• The people who harvest the food we eat work brutally hard and most make less then minimum wage.
• Helicopters spray massive amounts of pesticides on fruits and vegetables.
• Scores of American cities contain “food deserts” whose residents have no access to fresh food.
• Many Americans too poor to eat well are white.
• Many Americans also have never learned the art of how to prepare fresh food for their own tables, and instead gobble huge amounts of fast food, which is loaded with salt and sugar.
These are but a few of the unsettling facts about how we produce and consume food which Tracie McMillan unearthed in a yearlong undercover mission to find out what it takes to eat well in America. Her mission is detailed in her new book, “Eating Well in America.”
She worked as a field hand in California’s Central Valley; as a shelf stocker at a Walmart Supercenter in a Detroit suburb; and as a “food assembler” at an Applebee’s restaurant. Ms. McMillan has written about food and class for a number of newspapers and magazines but she told her employers in the agribusiness that she was simply a troubled woman with a lot of personal problems who “just wanted to work hard and not think.”
Because cheap labor is always welcome in the food business, Ms. McMillan succeeded in getting the jobs she wanted even though in at least one instance it would have been better for her health if she hadn’t.
That instance was her first job as a field hand in California’s Central Valley, a major source of the produce we eat. The Valley runs through a desert, water for crops is supplied by irrigation and in harvesting season the valley is so hot that heat stroke is a common affliction among field workers. Ms. McMillan is a strong healthy woman in her early 30s but she was quickly sickened by the intense heat and dust on a peach-picking job. Kneeling on the floor of a library bathroom stall, she rightly asked herself: “Whose F-ing idea was it to grow food in a desert?”
She says that then and there she learned “the truth in [philosopher] Bernard DeVoto’s observation that, in the West, ‘water has exactly the value of blood.’” Conflict over the dry West’s dwindling supply of water is a serious problem.
Ms. McMillan next tried garlic-cutting. She was on that job barely two days when her right arm gave out. This brought an end to her fieldhand career. The only good to come out of it were the people she met — poor Latinos who survive this brutal life because of the strength of their family ties and their strong communities. These workers take care of each other and they took care of Ms. McMillan.
Every page of her book is interesting and instructive but I found that her chapter on Detroit the most riveting. Ms. McMillan worked at a Walmart in the city’s suburbs — she has good and bad things to say about Walmart — but it is her description of the city itself which brought home how bad life can get when an America city loses the industries which once made it vibrant and prosperous.
Most of Detroit is a “food desert,” even though the city is a major hub of the agricultural distribution system. Scores of trucks bring fresh food daily into Detroit but none of it stays in the city itself. The food is transferred to the affluent suburbs where all the supermarkets are located. Detroit has no supermarkets, only small grocery stores that sell food that is boxed or canned. Detroit’s poor people — the vast majority of the city’s population — have no access to fresh food because they do not have cars to drive to the suburbs.
Yet, Ms. McMillan sees hope for Detroit because of the thousands of vacant lots in the city which have been turned into gardens that produce crops like beans, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, kale, carrots and strawberries. Every year, more and more vacant land is turned into food gardens. Soon, the city will be able to feed itself, if — and it’s a very big if — redevelopment does not destroy the gardens.
City councilman Ken Cockrel told Ms. McMillan: “If we all think about where we want Detroit to go...we don’t want it looking like a farm in Kansas. We want it looking like Manhattan.”
Finally, Ms. McMillan points out that there is another huge barrier between Americans and nutritious eating. Even when fresh food is made available to them, many Americans don’t know how to cook it. Ms. McMillan’s solution: cooking classes for the masses.
The major problems Ms. McMillan discovers have been discussed in the media for some time, but the devil, as always, is in the details. And it is the devilish details that characterize our food and production systems that Ms. McMillan’s research unearthed. Her book is an invaluable eye-opener.
*
(The American Way of Eating, by Tracie McMillan, published by Scribner, NY NY, 2012, 319 pages, $25.)
By Grace Wiltbank
Contributing Writer
• This country has an obesity epidemic because eating poorly is easier than eating well.
• The people who harvest the food we eat work brutally hard and most make less then minimum wage.
• Helicopters spray massive amounts of pesticides on fruits and vegetables.
• Scores of American cities contain “food deserts” whose residents have no access to fresh food.
• Many Americans too poor to eat well are white.
• Many Americans also have never learned the art of how to prepare fresh food for their own tables, and instead gobble huge amounts of fast food, which is loaded with salt and sugar.
These are but a few of the unsettling facts about how we produce and consume food which Tracie McMillan unearthed in a yearlong undercover mission to find out what it takes to eat well in America. Her mission is detailed in her new book, “Eating Well in America.”
She worked as a field hand in California’s Central Valley; as a shelf stocker at a Walmart Supercenter in a Detroit suburb; and as a “food assembler” at an Applebee’s restaurant. Ms. McMillan has written about food and class for a number of newspapers and magazines but she told her employers in the agribusiness that she was simply a troubled woman with a lot of personal problems who “just wanted to work hard and not think.”
Because cheap labor is always welcome in the food business, Ms. McMillan succeeded in getting the jobs she wanted even though in at least one instance it would have been better for her health if she hadn’t.
That instance was her first job as a field hand in California’s Central Valley, a major source of the produce we eat. The Valley runs through a desert, water for crops is supplied by irrigation and in harvesting season the valley is so hot that heat stroke is a common affliction among field workers. Ms. McMillan is a strong healthy woman in her early 30s but she was quickly sickened by the intense heat and dust on a peach-picking job. Kneeling on the floor of a library bathroom stall, she rightly asked herself: “Whose F-ing idea was it to grow food in a desert?”
She says that then and there she learned “the truth in [philosopher] Bernard DeVoto’s observation that, in the West, ‘water has exactly the value of blood.’” Conflict over the dry West’s dwindling supply of water is a serious problem.
Ms. McMillan next tried garlic-cutting. She was on that job barely two days when her right arm gave out. This brought an end to her fieldhand career. The only good to come out of it were the people she met — poor Latinos who survive this brutal life because of the strength of their family ties and their strong communities. These workers take care of each other and they took care of Ms. McMillan.
Every page of her book is interesting and instructive but I found that her chapter on Detroit the most riveting. Ms. McMillan worked at a Walmart in the city’s suburbs — she has good and bad things to say about Walmart — but it is her description of the city itself which brought home how bad life can get when an America city loses the industries which once made it vibrant and prosperous.
Most of Detroit is a “food desert,” even though the city is a major hub of the agricultural distribution system. Scores of trucks bring fresh food daily into Detroit but none of it stays in the city itself. The food is transferred to the affluent suburbs where all the supermarkets are located. Detroit has no supermarkets, only small grocery stores that sell food that is boxed or canned. Detroit’s poor people — the vast majority of the city’s population — have no access to fresh food because they do not have cars to drive to the suburbs.
Yet, Ms. McMillan sees hope for Detroit because of the thousands of vacant lots in the city which have been turned into gardens that produce crops like beans, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, kale, carrots and strawberries. Every year, more and more vacant land is turned into food gardens. Soon, the city will be able to feed itself, if — and it’s a very big if — redevelopment does not destroy the gardens.
City councilman Ken Cockrel told Ms. McMillan: “If we all think about where we want Detroit to go...we don’t want it looking like a farm in Kansas. We want it looking like Manhattan.”
Finally, Ms. McMillan points out that there is another huge barrier between Americans and nutritious eating. Even when fresh food is made available to them, many Americans don’t know how to cook it. Ms. McMillan’s solution: cooking classes for the masses.
The major problems Ms. McMillan discovers have been discussed in the media for some time, but the devil, as always, is in the details. And it is the devilish details that characterize our food and production systems that Ms. McMillan’s research unearthed. Her book is an invaluable eye-opener.
*
(The American Way of Eating, by Tracie McMillan, published by Scribner, NY NY, 2012, 319 pages, $25.)