An Insider’s Guide to Detroit

Wall Street Journal “Off Duty” • June 19, 2015

FRESH OUT OF BANKRUPTCY and angling toward boomtown, Detroit is attracting an influx of creative young professionals and entrepreneurs to its middle- and working-class mix.

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The Best Mexican Food of My Life

The Wall Street Journal • March 1, 2012

A few years ago, working an undercover stint for “The American Way of Eating,” I had the best soup of my life. I had just taken a room—a cubby, really— with farmworkers in California’s Salinas Valley, paying $300 for the next seven weeks, using it as a homebase from which to find field work. As soon as I agreed to take the room, my landlady led me into the kitchen and set a steaming bowl of soup, scarlet and speckled with golden globules of fat, before me. Chunks of fish, fleshy and white, floated in the bowl alongside translucent onion snippets and scraps of herbs. Eat! she commanded in Spanish, handing me half a lime and a salt shaker. Then she pointed to a stack of fresh flour tortillas. Eat!

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A Food-Chain Reaction

The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 28, 2012

In 2009, Tracie McMillan, an accomplished young writer, spent nearly a year working undercover as an agricultural field laborer in California, as a produce handler at a Michigan Wal-Mart and as a kitchen worker at a Brooklyn branch of Applebee’s, the country’s largest “family style” restaurant chain. The result of her efforts is “The American Way of Eating.” The best thing about this engagingly written tract is its excellent and sometimes moving first-person narrative of the author’s experiences sharing, albeit briefly and under false colors, the daily grind of workers at the bottom of the Great American Food Chain.

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