9781439171967

What if you can't afford nine-dollar tomatoes? That was the question award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan couldn't escape as she watched the debate about America's meals unfold, one that urges us to pay food's true costwhich is to say, pay more. So in 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters. From the fields of California, a Walmart produce aisle outside of Detroit, and the kitchen of a New York City Applebee's, McMillan takes us into the heart of America's meals. With startling intimacy she portrays the lives and food of Mexican garlic crews, Midwestern produce managers, and Caribbean line cooks, while also chronicling her own attempts to live and eat on meager wages. Along the way, she asked the questions still facing America a decade after the declaration of an obesity epidemic: Why do we eat the way we do? And how can we change it? To find out, McMillan goes beyond the food on her plate to examine the national prio-rities that put it there. With her absorbing blend of riveting narrative and formidable investigative reporting, McMillan takes us from dusty fields to clanging restaurant kitchens, linking her work to the quality of our mealsand always placing her observations in the context of America's approach not just to farms and kitchens but to wages and work. The surprising answers that McMillan found on her journey have profound implications for our food and agriculture, and also for how we see ourselves as a nation. Through stunning reportage, Tracie McMillan makes the simple case thatcity or country, rich or pooreveryone wants good food. Fearlessly reported and beautifully written, The American Way of Eating goes beyond statistics and culture wars to deliver a book that is fiercely intelligent and compulsively readable. Talking about dinner will never be the same again.

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A working-class transplant from rural Michigan, Brooklyn-based writer Tracie McMillan has written about food and class for a variety of publications including, The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Magazine; Saveur; and Slate. After putting herself through New York University, she began reporting and from 2001 to 2005 she was the managing editor of the award-winning magazine City Limits. There, she won recognition from organizations ranging from the James Beard Foundation to World Hunger Year. Follow her at TracieMcMillan.com or @TMMcMillan.

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INTRODUCTION
Eating in America

The first Brooklyn supermarket I ever walked into had a cockroach in the deli. Not one of those stealthy critters stealing along the crevices in the floor, or hanging out backstage in dry storage. No, this was a proud-to-be-here New York City roach, crawling openly up the wall’s white tile before dropping, unceremoniously, onto the meat slicer below. I decided to skip the lunchmeat and headed for the produce aisle.

I sought out hard, pink tomatoes and pale spheres of iceberg lettuce, bags of Red Delicious apples and dusty sacks of potatoes. The contents of my grocery basket telegraphed my Midwestern upbringing. I’d been so busy putting myself through college by running errands for a fashion designer, tutoring rich kids, tutoring public high school kids, waiting tables at a barbecue joint, and a slew of other odd jobs that I hadn’t yet made the city my home. I paid for the food and, to save $1.50 on bus fare, walked ten blocks, about half a mile, home. As I piled the groceries on the counter, I told my roommate about the roach.

That’s pretty gross, he said. Maybe we can shop somewhere else?

But we never did. We were students, keeping rent low by living an hour from campus in a neighborhood thick with families headed by dishwashers and seamstresses, housekeepers and day laborers. Neighborhood signs were dotted with script in Polish, Chinese, and Spanish. If there were good ethnic shops I was too blind to see them; raised in rural Michigan, the only food stores I knew to look for were supermarkets. And the roach-in-the-deli was the only one we could walk to. We didn’t cook much, anyway. We were too busy.

All of this—the chore of finding food, the lack of time to do anything with it when we did, the indifference to our meals—was familiar. I grew up in a small town outside Flint. My dad sold lawn equipment for a living. My mom was gravely ill for nearly a decade. Most of my family’s time and money went to medical bills, and I grew up eating the kind of meals you’d expect from an effectively single working dad. Sometimes I helped make them, especially if it meant we’d end up with my favorites, like Tuna Helper, on the table. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d page through my mom’s Good Housekeeping cookbook and bake cakes and breads to entertain myself while, ostensibly, helping out around the house.

We ate a lot of Helper meals and Ortega Taco Dinners when I was growing up, and I liked them. We had salads of chopped iceberg lettuce tossed with diced carrots, celery, wedges of tomato, and some Wish-Bone Ranch dressing. On weeknights, mashed potatoes came from a box, toast was brushed with melted Country Crock and sprinkled with garlic salt, and Miracle Whip held together the pasta salad. Sure, home-cooked and farm-fresh stuff was great. And sometimes we did eat like that. In the summers, my dad’s garden, a grove of vegetable plants spiking up through black plastic sheeting and an inch of weed killer, would let us feast on tomatoes and peppers cheaply. And most Sundays, when my dad had relaxed from his week, he’d throw a roast in the oven, boil some potatoes, and steam some vegetables. But regularly eating food that took that much time or money—or, most outrageously of all, both—wasn’t for people like us. It was for the people my grandmother described, with equal parts envy and derision, as fancy; my father’s word was snob. And I wasn’t about to be like that.

No, here in Brooklyn I’d do the same thing my family had done in Michigan. I’d make do with my culinary lot in life. If I didn’t have extra money to buy healthy food, or the time to prepare it, that meant the cheap and the processed. For a very long time, I couldn’t see it any other way.

Like all myths, the idea that only the affluent and educated care about their meals has spread not because it is true, but because parts of it are. Healthier food is more expensive; that much is true. So is the fact that it can be hard to find in poor neighborhoods. And yet it requires an impossible leap of logic to conclude from these facts that only the rich care about their meals. “Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind,” wrote Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She may be right, but for most people—myself included—seeing good food as a luxury lifestyle product has been so deeply embedded in our thinking about our meals that we barely notice it. I didn’t until I met Vanessa.

I had been living in New York for nearly a decade, and was covering the poverty beat for a small magazine. I met people in welfare offices, child care centers, housing project courtyards, and after-school programs, and wrote stories about them; in doing so, I often ended up in their homes. I ate Jimmy Dean hamburgers in the kitchen of a fortysomething lady gang leader. I watched a Dominican home health aide run her four kids through math homework while spiraling the peel off an orange with a paring knife. I shared crackers and spreadable cheese during snack time at a child care center in a brownstone apartment. But I was there to write about welfare rules and crappy jobs, not food, so I hardly noticed it. What did food have to do with my work, anyway? The people I was writing about weren’t fancy. Neither was I.

For years, I insisted food wasn’t important to me. And yet, I had always made birthday cakes from scratch for my friends. In college, I shoplifted spices from an A&P to experiment with Indian curries. And while I kept my own grocery budget modest, my college years saw me working for an affluent family and occasionally cooking their dinner—leading me to stumble through a world of cookbooks and ingredients beyond Betty Crocker. In spite of myself, I started cooking fancy food: Moroccan stews, chicken breast and portobello mushrooms with balsamic vinegar, lentils green and red and yellow.

An internal debate began: