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

“Food has always been one of America’s great paradoxes. Even before the vast abundance of industrial agriculture came to bear on our meals, our nation’s affluent feasted on fresh vegetables and fine sweets while our poor made do with far less.”

The contrast between abundance and deprivation is one that McMillan returns to consistently throughout the book. In this quote, she shows how this dynamic has its roots in the earliest days of American society. This isn’t just a problem of diet, McMillan says; the indifference of America to its citizens’ access to healthy food is an abandonment of its founding promise as a land of opportunity.

“I wait for Pilar to take me aside and politely explain that she won’t be needing my help again. I decide that when the moment comes, I’ll shake my head in embarrassment and accept my fate quietly. But no.”

McMillan shows her frustration and shame at working much more slowly than her more experienced colleagues in the fields. Her inability to match their pace shows that, despite being perceived as unskilled, farm laborers are highly accomplished at what they do. This quote also hints at the factor that makes McMillan’s time in the fields bearable: the charity and patience of her fellow workers.

“By the time an apple ends up at the supermarket, the entire cost of growing it accounts for just about 16 percent of the price, while the other 84 percent goes to the complex infrastructure that got it there, what industry experts call marketing.”

This quote highlights two themes that run through the book: that the distribution of food in America has come to depend on complicated networks, and the idea that the industrialization and privatization that created those networks don’t necessarily lead to more affordable food. This quote also refutes the argument that paying agricultural laborers more will increase food prices; since these wages only account for a fraction of the cost, raising them is unlikely to have a significant effect on prices.

“The heat poses the most immediate danger. Dust and fuzz are wreaking havoc on my sinuses, but that’s the kind of thing that causes serious health problems in the long run; I have the distinct luxury of being here only for a short while.”

McMillan’s time in the fields is marked by the difficult environmental conditions of California’s Central Valley. In this quote, she’s pointing to the risk of heat-related illnesses, which have caused multiple deaths among farm workers in the state, at a much higher rate than other kinds of workers. This quote also demonstrates how race, class, and citizenship status insulate McMillan from the worst consequences, as she can ultimately choose other work.

“Irrigation is a bargain we made with the natural world. All great deals come with a cost, and irrigation’s is this: impoverished water and soil.”

Irrigation has made farming in the arid environment of the Central Valley possible, allowing growers to plant higher-value crops like peaches, which take years to mature. It’s also causing issues, such as an increased level of sodium in the soil and an increased risk of contamination to aquifers. This quote alludes to a theme that will emerge later in the book: that fresh, healthy food isn’t necessarily best produced by industrial agriculture.

“The workers had noticed that the company rounds down the weight of the buckets of peas they pick each day to the nearest pound instead of paying for the excess ounces, a practice I’d read about in accounts of farm work in the 1930s but had assumed had long since stopped.”

This quote speaks to the exploitative nature of farm work, even in California, where labor legislation is stronger than in other states. By noting that she’d assumed this practice had stopped, McMillan is also highlighting her own rationale for her investigation—that the only way to gain knowledge of food practices is to observe those practices directly—and underscoring how the complexity of the American food system prevents people from having an understanding of the means of production.

“None of us earn minimum wage, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at our checks, where some curious accounting is at work.”

According to labor legislation, employers are required to make up the difference if a worker’s piece rate for picking isn’t equivalent to the minimum wage, but as McMillan finds out, that rule is rarely followed. This situation highlights the precarious status of the people doing this work, many of whom are undocumented immigrants and therefore unwilling to speak out. It also speaks to the difference between McMillan and her fellow workers: Unlike them, she’s a citizen and legally entitled to an hourly wage, even if she doesn’t get it.

“Even after I pay for my rent and car insurance, I am spending more than a hundred dollars in cash each week, which strikes me as extravagant, but when I look at my budget I am baffled as to how to cut spending.”

The difficulty of budgeting appropriately is an issue that comes up throughout the book, whether McMillan is being paid a piece rate or, later on in her investigation, minimum wage. Much of her budget goes to take-out food, but the conditions of farm work make reducing this expense difficult: the overcrowded housing where kitchen access is limited; the lack of time and energy to plan less expensive meals. By elucidating the factors that constrain her own choices, McMillan is illustrating how few options people living in poverty have when it comes to healthy food.

“In the end, it comes down to my arm or the fields, that’s how I see it. And with all the luxuries conferred upon me at birth, I choose the former.”

In this quote, McMillan has sustained a repetitive strain injury from cutting garlic, but unlike her fellow workers, she’s granted the opportunity to try different work after she reports the injury. Many workers, assuming they don’t have coverage and fearful of being fired, don’t bother to report. In the end, even modified work is impossible for McMillan, underscoring her privilege, as an American citizen with an education, in being able to seek other work.

“In just a couple short decades, America had taken the industrial economies of scale and assembly-line efficiencies that had spawned a revolution in manufacturing and applied both to its meals.”

Supermarkets have come to supply most of the food Americans buy, but throughout the chapters dedicated to Walmart, McMillan shows there is nothing inevitable or necessary about this system. Instead, it’s the product of social changes, like the introduction of processed food that can be purchased in bulk, that give large supermarkets a competitive advantage. This quote illustrates that process, and points to a theme that will emerge later in the book: how food has come to be seen as a consumer product rather than a social good.

“Selling flat-screens might seem to be a world apart from selling food, but at Walmart it’s not.”

This quote highlights how Walmart’s structure allowed it to out-compete smaller grocers. By selling a huge diversity of items, Walmart can make a profit on some items while accepting a loss on others, something smaller stores can’t do. It also speaks to a dynamic that McMillan observes while working in produce at Walmart: Those in charge of the produce departments, and therefore the produce supply for many Americans, don’t necessarily have the specialized training or knowledge commensurate with that level of responsibility.

“Supermarkets were a showcase for America’s industrial agriculture and abundance, but beneath the surface they were a system for distributing food.”

Supermarkets are tied to many facets of American society, from the growth of suburban communities to the rise of industrial agriculture. In this quote, McMillan is highlighting how in becoming so ubiquitous, supermarkets have become the main way Americans feed themselves. Their distribution, however, is uneven; the availability of supermarkets is often limited in poor communities, a disparity McMillan returns to repeatedly throughout the book.

“Twenty year ago, my customer at the lettuce rack would have had one option if he wanted lettuce: Buy a head, wash it, dry it, cut it. But food companies saw that Americans were losing both time to cook and fluency in the kitchen, so they began offering ways to avoid using the kitchen at all.”

Even though processing produce makes it more expensive to purchase and more liable to contamination, processed items like bagged salads make up an increasing share of supermarkets’ produce sales. This trend reflects both the growth of supermarket chains, as they developed the networks to coordinate house-branded produce, as well as a decreasing culinary knowledge among Americans, as research suggests cooking skills are being lost, prompting people to turn to easier options, like bagged salads.

“The more time I spend traversing the divide between Detroit and its suburbs, the more I realize the term ‘food desert’ isn’t quite right.”

Although some Detroiters bristle at the term, the city is often evoked as a primary example of a food desert—an area in which there’s insufficient access to food. As McMillan spends time in the city, she realizes these barriers don’t reflect a lack of healthy food; rather, they show a lack of planning in how that food will reach the city’s residents. More positively, this quote also shows McMillan’s dawning realization of the scale of urban agriculture in Detroit, offering an alternative way to ensure access to fruits and vegetables.

“The conventional wisdom about selling food just the way it comes out of the ground is that to do so profitably requires either massive, Walmartian scale or very high prices.”

This quote sets up the dominant way in which most Americans procure their product—through supermarkets—and contrasts that with the small-scale agriculture found in places like Detroit. By examining how urban farmers in Detroit provide food to consumers at affordable rates, mostly by cutting out the middle men, McMillan is highlighting an argument she’ll return to later in the book: that providing healthy food need not be as expensive as it appears. In questioning the conventional wisdom on growing, McMillan also highlights how industrial-scale agriculture comes with its own inefficiencies, citing research that suggests the practices on display in Detroit’s urban farms may be better suited to provide fruits and vegetables to the city’s residents.

“As the American middle class sprawled out after World War II, and we became a nation transported by automobiles, eating out came within reach of far more Americans.”

With this quote, McMillan is once again highlighting how social dynamics created the American food system as it exists today. In this case, increased mobility and disposable income resulted in dining out taking up a larger percentage of Americans’ food budgets from the 1950s onwards. In this section, McMillan explores how this practice continues, despite increasing inequality and stagnating wages, fueled not by people’s wages but by their lack of familiarity with the kitchen and energy to plan meals.

“There’s one thing Applebee’s has in common with smaller restaurants that cheat their workers, though. I am never given formal food safety training of any kind.”

The lack of food safety training is an issue that McMillan encounters repeatedly throughout her journey, from her time in the fields to her time as an expediter at Applebee’s. This quote also highlights the exploitative nature of restaurant work, which McMillan herself experiences. Even though Applebee’s pays her minimum wage—not always the case in restaurants—she’s paid less than promised initially and is not paid for mandatory training.

“Just as assembly lines pare down the skill and education needed by individual workers to, say, build a car, the structure of the Applebee’s kitchen removes the need for culinary training.”

This quote illustrates a consequence of large-scale restaurant chains: In order for a restaurant like Applebee’s to provide the same dining experience in all of its branches, it must take the decision-making involved in food preparation out of the hands of frontline workers and consolidate it in a centralized food preparation arm. Similarly, processed food has removed the need for culinary knowledge among home cooks. In either case, the result is food that is less healthy, whether in the form of box meals that are higher in salt and sugar, or plastic that flakes onto the meals McMillan helps prepare at Applebee’s when she removes pre-portioned ingredients from their bags.

“Box meals don’t save us time any more than going out to eat does, and they don’t even save us money.”

Processed food is marketed as a time saver, but McMillan suggests that they’re actually doing something else: saving people the effort of planning meals. This is true whether those meals are made at home or in the kitchen of a restaurant like Applebee’s. This framing is another example of how factors other than preference shape people’s dietary choices; in this case, it’s the loss of familiarity with the kitchen that causes people to opt for processed options.

“The key to getting people to eat better isn’t that they should spend more money, or even that they should spend more time. It’s making the actual cooking of a meal into an easy choice, the obvious answer.”

With this quote, McMillan is returning to an idea that appears throughout the book and was in some ways the precipitating factor for her investigation: that cooking classes should be seen as part of basic education. McMillan observes the importance of cooking training at the outset of the book, when she attends a healthy cooking class, and in her own life, whereby, having picked up culinary skills as a child, McMillan was able to expand her diet beyond processed food. This knowledge is too important to acquire haphazardly, she argues, suggesting it should be incorporated into public education.

“It occurs to me, in sequence, that this might be one reason women have been so rare in restaurant kitchens; that much of what kept my workplace bearable was not my own ability to roll with the punches but Freddie’s personal interest in making sure I faced very few of them to begin with; and that this is possibly a glimpse of what life— not just work—is like for the vast sea of women born with fewer privileges than me.”

McMillan previously depicted a work environment at Applebee’s that was teasing and often suggestive but was also one of equals. After she was sexually assaulted at a party with coworkers, her perspective changed, and she acknowledges how her privileged status as an educated white woman gave her options beyond those of many women in a similar situation.

“Wages, health care, work hours, and kitchen literacy are just as critical to changing our diets as the agriculture we practice or the places at which we shop.”

The complexity of reasons for why people don’t eat healthily is a central theme of the book. Here McMillan is drawing from her observations in fields, food retail, and restaurant kitchens to show how even improving access to produce won’t change people’s habits without also giving them the time, knowledge, and income to eat healthily. The fact that those factors aren’t in place, McMillan argues, shows that America has not prioritized ensuring access to healthy food.

“At the human end of the food chain, eating is not just an agricultural act, but a profoundly social one as well.”

The social bonds that are created around eating are on display throughout the book, from the communal meals McMillan eats with her fellow farmworkers to the ways in which McMillan bonds with her Walmart and Applebee’s colleagues over food. McMillan also draws attention to the fact that all of the people who populate the food system, from farmers to produce managers, play a role in ensuring food gets to people’s plates.