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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BetaIntroduction - Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Farming”
Introduction Summary: “Eating in America”
In the opening paragraph of The American Way of Eating, McMillan situates the reader in a neighborhood grocery store in Brooklyn. She just observed a cockroach falling into the meat slicer, and the produce was less than fresh. As unappealing as the grocery store was, McMillan continued to shop there, constrained by her limited budget and lack of time or energy to go anywhere else.
McMillan explains how her indifference to her meals dated back to her childhood. Raised in a small town in Michigan, McMillan describes how meals typically consisted of processed food such as Tuna Helper or Miracle Whip, and that home-cooked food from local farms “wasn’t for people like us” (2). This attitude carried into her adult life, as she relegated a preoccupation with healthy food to the domain of upper-class snobs.
In the next section, however, McMillan explains how meeting Vanessa, a teenager who takes a cooking class focused on health and farming, changes her perspective. Vanessa lives in a neighborhood where junk food is abundant. She wants to improve her diet but faces an almost insurmountable cost in doing so. Inspired by Vanessa’s paradox, McMillan sets out to investigate how the features of American society, ranging from the lack of access to supermarkets in poor neighborhoods to a lack of social programming, force low-income families to choose cheaper, processed food. This divide can be traced to America’s earliest days, when plantations produced an excess of vegetables that the poor could not afford, and continues to the present, when “our agriculture is abundant but healthy diets are not” (10).
McMillan closes the section by laying out how she intends to use her skills as a reporter to investigate the contradictions inherent in that system: by going undercover as a farm laborer, a supermarket worker, and an expediter in a restaurant.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Grapes”
In the opening of Chapter 1, we find McMillan struggling to find work in Bakersfield, in California’s Central Valley. Her fortunes change when she meets Pilar, a woman living in the neighboring trailer who is a forewoman running a crew of grape pickers.
On her first day on the job, McMillan answers repeated questions about why she, as a white woman, is looking for work in the fields, and she quickly learns how difficult that work is. While other laborers pick and trim bunches of grapes at a rapid pace, McMillan struggles to keep up. At the end of her first nine-hour day, she’s earned just $26.
McMillan explains how even though many of the arguments against raising the wages of laborers cite a potential increase in the cost of food, labor costs are only a small portion of the overall price: “if you pay a dollar for a pound of apples or a head of lettuce in the supermarket, only about six cents cover the farm work used to get it there” (28). McMillan notes that nearly doubling workers’ wages would only increase American families’ grocery bills by roughly $16 a year.
That wages aren’t higher, McMillan says, is a function of the fact that growers don’t need to pay any more than they do. The duals threat of deportation—given that many workers are undocumented—and the mechanization of labor put pressure on workers to accept what they’re offered.
After a day picking grapes, McMillan switches to selling sodas in the fields alongside Pilar and her 11-year-old son, Sergio. At the end of the day, McMillan has made $14 in profit, and Pilar $13, the equivalent of $2.17 an hour. McMillan reflects how for Pilar, the calculation is not whether she’s making enough to justify the work, but simply whether she’s taking in money, justifying even this small sum.
Even though she’s made a friend in Pilar, McMillan quickly moves on. In the final paragraphs, she lays out her plan to relocate to Fresno in search of opportunities to pick vegetables, stating a sense of optimism over her job prospects.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Peaches”
At the outset of Chapter 2, McMillan has moved on to picking peaches. She describes an encounter in an orchard with her new boss, Constantino, in which he explains her role; unlike in her first job, she won’t be picking but sorting, taking out peaches that are too small or unripe. As in the grape fields, McMillan struggles to keep pace with the others, but her first day has an upside: Another laborer offers to rent McMillan a room in her house.
The house is small, and the room is infested with cockroaches. Behind the house, there’s an addition and a cabin called a casita; between the cabin and the house, 14 people sleep on the property, conditions that McMillan tells us fit the definition of severe overcrowding and are typical for farmworkers. Despite the health risks associated with overcrowding, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff for those trying to save money on a farmworker’s low wages, and McMillan takes the room.
Back in the fields, McMillan struggles to deal with the heat while sorting peaches. Heat illnesses are a common threat to farmworkers: “since 2005, eleven farmworkers have died in California due to heat-related causes” (45). McMillan falls ill with heat exhaustion, and as she’s recovering in an air-conditioned library, she reflects on the improbability of growing food in the arid environment of California’s Central Valley.
The chapter moves on to a discussion of the role of irrigation in turning the Central Valley from a near-desert from June to October to a site of prodigious agricultural production. Irrigation also has a price, in the form of denuded soils and contaminated water. These environmental changes can make it difficult or impossible to grow crops—as McMillan observes in some fields in the Central Valley and notes happened in ancient Mesopotamia. As the chapter closes, McMillan prepares to move again, this time to Salinas.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Cutting Garlic”
McMillan opens Chapter 3 in Greenfield, a community in California’s Salinas Valley, where she’s found a room to rent in the home of a farmworker named Dolores and her family. For nearly two weeks, McMillan struggles to get work. Her situation is particularly precarious as a woman—sexual harassment and assaults of farmworker women have been well documented since the 1990s. Nevertheless, in her desperation McMillan is preparing to meet strangers before dawn in the hopes of them leading her to a crew in need of bodies when Dolores asks her cousin to find McMillan work picking garlic.
As in her past experiences of farm work, McMillan is far outpaced by more experienced laborers. At the end of the first day, she’s collected 10 buckets, equivalent to $16. Some of the other workers think McMillan, as a citizen, is eligible for minimum wage, which would increase her daily total to $68. McMillan herself won’t know the answer until she receives her first paycheck.
In the meantime, McMillan finds herself burning quickly through her money; one fifth of her income goes to food and a third to rent. To keep her costs low, she eats her evening meal with Dolores and her family and, in return, helps Dolores’s 14-year-old daughter, Inez, with her English. Like the rest of her family, and many farmworkers in the United States, Inez’s first language is Triqui, an indigenous Mexican language, rather than Spanish, so tutoring her is a challenge, but McMillan establishes a bond by having Inez share a skill of her own: making tortillas.
In the fields, McMillan makes progress as well, increasing her daily total to 15 buckets a day by her second week—a total made all the more necessary after she realizes she is being paid a piece rate after all. Making minimum wage at a piece rate would require filling five buckets an hour, an almost superhuman task: “That’s two hundred gallons, roughly half a ton of heads of garlic—in eight hours” (75).
McMillan closes the chapter by reflecting on how her experience of employers cheating workers and not enforcing safety standards is at odds with the marketing of garlic by two of the country’s largest garlic producers, Christopher Ranch and the Garlic Company, who bill their product as closely supervised compared to garlic coming from places such as China.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Gleaning Garlic”
McMillan secures a windfall when she lands a position “gleaning garlic” alongside three other women:
[…] the task before us dates back to biblical times, but our purposes is entirely different from what is described in the book of Leviticus, which counsels farmers to “not gather the gleanings of thy harvest,” but to “leave them for the poor and stranger.” We’re here today to scrape a little more profit out of the land (80).
Collecting heads of garlic that were left behind by cutters, the woman can make significantly more than when they’re doing cutting themselves. As they prepare to start gleaning, the woman compare their totals from cutting the day before, which range from $49.60 to $14.40. For gleaning, when they’re paid by the hour, they’ll make much more than that. Initially McMillan is confused by the economic argument for this, but as she later finds out, labor contractors are contractually bound to provide this service, even if it cuts into their profits.
For the most part, though, McMillan subsists on piecework, and she consistently spends more than she earns. An additional blow comes after she develops extensor epicondylitis, or tennis elbow, from the repetitive strain of cutting garlic. The company offers her the job picking up leftover garlic, which she can do with her uninjured arm. Even with this adjustment, however, the work continues to aggravate her injured elbow. Her patience runs out when she realizes the company, El Bajio, has been paying her less than she should be making at minimum wage; in the time she works with them, McMillan calculates they underpay her by $454.
After this final straw, McMillan decides to give up on farm work and prepares to move on to the next stage in her journey through the food system, in Michigan. Before she leaves, she tells her friends she’s a writer, and they ask her to spread the word about the conditions she chronicled over the course of the chapter: the poor working conditions, the cheating by contractors on wages, and the low pay.
Introduction - Part 1 Analysis
In the opening chapters of The American Way of Eating, McMillan establishes the contradiction inherent in the American food system—that despite the prodigious abundance of food, many people can’t afford to feed themselves in a healthy way—and lays out her intention to interrogate the assumption that people living in poverty don’t care about what they eat.
McMillan opens the chapter by explaining how her own experience being raised by an effectively single father with little time to spare informed her relationship with food, creating a suspicion that food that required extra time and cost more to prepare was for people her father described as snobs. By laying out this tension in her own life, McMillan not only establishing the structure of the book, which follows her personal journey through the American food system; she’s also laying the groundwork for the broader theme of the work: That people’s class, rather than their palate, dictates what ends up on their plate.
McMillan situates these barriers within a burgeoning consciousness of the importance of food, fueled by everything from an increasing sense of the importance of local produce to a growing concern with childhood obesity. What this conversation is missing, she says, is an understanding of the real reasons people don’t eat well.
Having established this gap, McMillan sets out—using a novelistic, first-person style, to show that it is neither inevitable nor natural but is the product of policies that dictate the production and distribution of food. In the book’s first four chapters, McMillan struggles alongside other laborers in exploitative and poorly paid field work, but she uses anecdotes from her own experience to show how her race, class, and citizenship status insulate her from the worst of the exploitation, as when she falls ill from heat stroke while picking peaches and can slow down without fear of being fired or deported; when a fellow farmworker named Juan offers help and proposals of marriage, attracted by her race; or finally, when she leaves farm work behind entirely.
At regular intervals, McMillan calculates how much she’s making. The repetitive nature of these tallies underscores how little laborers earn and how even the small amount they’re promised often ends up being less due to cheating on the part of employers, for which there’s little recourse. McMillan contrast these low wages with the actual savings that come from either underpaying workers or mechanizing jobs. In either case, she notes, the cost of growing food is less than a fifth of the sticker price, most of which is attributable to marketing—the complex networks that get food to people’s dinner plates.
Throughout these chapters, McMillan is helped by her fellow field workers, like Pilar, who insists McMillan takes an even share of the money earned picking grapes even though McMillan was the slowest in the group, or Dolores, the landlady who invites McMillan to their family dinner table for an evening meal nearly every day—the only way McMillan can afford to eat healthily on the meager money she’s making in the fields. McMillan uses the encounters she has with these individuals to animate the research she presents on US agriculture, personalizing the impact of agricultural policies on the people who work in the system. Through these descriptions, she also shows how the communities sustain themselves in difficult circumstances through the preparation and sharing of food—the backyard barbeque feast at Dolores’s house, or the time spent making tortillas with Dolores’s daughter Inez—presaging a theme she’ll develop towards the end of the book: that of eating a social act.
