Tracie McMillan The Gazette • Oct. 13, 2013
Tracie McMillan remembers sitting in the trailer outside of Bakersfield, Calif., giving herself a pep talk before opening the flimsy door. She’d been told she’d have to chat with others in the trailer park to find work in one of the nearby grape fields. It sounded easy at the time, but reality was different.
Civil Eats • Oct. 7, 2013
In 2004, Seth Holmes, a young American physician and anthropologist, undertook a trip that few take for kicks: He migrated from the rural highlands of Oaxaca in southern Mexico to the deserts of Arizona alongside a band of indigenous migrants bound for American farm fields.
I got a nice surprise this morning when a friend forwarded me The American Prospect’s Labor Day email highlighting their most important labor pieces from the last year. More to the point (for my purposes here, anyway) was the way they sold it:
This sharp piece from Slate’s LV Anderson brings class angst to the fore, and while I don’t envy her target — Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who entertained us by descending on America’s fattest town with dancing flash mobs brandishing woks and utensils—I am flattered to be held in esteemed company:
“The Splendid Table,” American Public Media • Aug. 18, 2013
Sometimes all the food slogans we live with are totally overwhelming: To be healthy you need to eat five a day. Eat local. Eat organic. Vote with your fork. And of course, good, healthy food is the right of every American.
In These Times • June 26, 2013
“Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?” asks Emily Matchar in her new book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, published in May by Simon & Schuster. Matchar wants to know why many young, middle-class women are returning to the home after their feminist forebears rushed to leave it—and whether the revival of domestic arts like home cooking and canning is also reviving some of the sexism that kept women moored to these tasks. “It’s easy to forget in the face of today’s foodie culture,” Matchar writes, “that cooking is not fun when it’s mandatory.”
If you’re looking for some summer reading, #AWE got a couple nice shout-outs recently: Molly at Word, the best little neighborhood bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, says “it’s a great investigative tale even if you’re not a sucker for The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Salt Sugar Fat.” Feel free to grab a copy of the book and … Read more
Dissent • May 22, 2013
In Dissent’s Spring 2012 Food issue, Marion Nestle pointed out that changing the food system is as radical an objective as those pursued by the civil rights, women’s rights, and environmentalist movements.
If you follow my Twitter feed @TMMcMillan, you’ll already know that on May 3, 2013, I was honored to receive the James Beard Journalism Award for Food Politics and the Environment. The irony of swanning around in a party dress with a champagne flute for writing about farm workers sleeping in the field is not … Read more
University of Iowa • May 15, 2013
Will Jennings, lecturer with the University of Iowa’s Rhetoric Department and Creative Campus Institute Fellow, will lead a discussion on the book, “The American Way of Eating” by Tracie McMillan. McMillan grew up with a regular diet of processed foods, but through the years became more interested in higher quality foods.
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