Tracie McMillan Grist • Dec. 16, 2011
Smack in the middle of a half-dozen shipping containers and striding up a mound of gravel, Johanna Gilligan, 31, can’t contain her excitement. “This looks so awesome!” She nods her head at an alcove between two containers, painted the pale color of new celery, with dry sinks attached. “That’s going to be for processing.”
I don’t have much in the way of fact to add to Jane Black’s summary of this interesting new study from UC-Davis researchers showing that it’s not America’s poor who are eating fast food, but our middle class. But I think this is interesting: Figuring out how to make healthier food rival the drive-through for … Read more
I’ve been waiting for the Dining Guide from the Restaurant Opportunities Center for a while, and it does not disappoint. Well, scratch that: It does disappoint, but only because they find such depressing norms across the restaurant industry, which now employs nearly 10 percent of U.S. workers. My alma-mater, Applebee’s, came through with straight failing … Read more
I’ve long been a fan of Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit, and farm manager Patrick Crouch was my first tour guide there. This charming interview with local urban farmer Edith Floyd encapsulates exactly what led me to cover urban farming in the first place: Normal people, living in neighborhoods, passionate about good food and growing … Read more
I’ll be moving content over from my old blog, 5DollarDinner, soon, but welcome to the new blog for Tracie McMillan (that’s me). This is where I’ll be talking about food, class, opportunity and inequity in America—which, as it happens, is the topic of my forthcoming book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, … Read more
Publishers Weekly • Nov. 28, 2011
Hailing from a middle-class rural Michigan background in which Tuna Helper and iceberg-lettuce salads were the usual dinner fare and later schooled at NYU, journalist McMillan (City Limits magazine) resolved to learn firsthand how the food America eats (mostly packaged and processed) is grown, distributed, and bought. Why does good, fresh food have to cost more and be harder to find than fast food?
Kirkus • Nov. 15, 2011
During the course of a year, former City Limits managing editor McMillan examined the process by which food goes from the field to the table.Whether picking bunches of table grapes, sorting peaches or cutting garlic, the author discovered firsthand the rigors of farm labor working alongside Mexicans and other migrant workers struggling to survive on paltry wages.
Saveur • June 21, 2011
On a clear September morning, I set out for the source of California’s most delicious strawberries—quite a trip if you take the scenic route. South of San Francisco, you trace the cliffs of Devil’s Slide until the two-lane highway—and your grip on the steering wheel—relaxes. A couple of hours later, just north of Davenport, you see a 1950s pickup truck on the side of the road with hand-painted signs declaring HERE LIES SWANTON BERRY FARM. It’s a storybook scene: a view of the Pacific, a farm stand stocked with fresh baked pies. But read through the news clips on the wall, and a weightier tale emerges. When Jim Cochran founded Swanton, in 1983, he was just another hippie farmer. But he became the man who unlocked the secrets of growing strawberries without pesticides and paying workers a fair wage to do it.
The Atlantic • Oct. 28, 2010
The bed of watercress beneath chef Andy Hollyday’s barbecued pork belly? Local. The ruby-hued crabapple jelly made by the Detroit Zymology Guild? That too. And the pectin for the preserves, the sorrel in Brother Nature Produce’s salad, the scarlet beets and crisp dilly beans hand-pickled by Suddenly Sauer. In fact, the food offered by Detroit’s hottest restaurateurs and food vendors at Home Slice, a recent benefit for Detroit’s contemporary art museum, could probably have been found any food-conscious event in the country. But—this being Detroit—there was a unique twist: For the Motor City’s food vanguard, “local” isn’t measured in miles, but in city blocks.
The Atlantic • June 10, 2010
How did it get so hard to feed kids healthy food?
This inquiry undergirds most recent efforts to examine what we feed our kids in school, yet from Two Angry Moms to Jamie Oliver’s School Food Revolution, the focus has tended to be on documenting what is wrong with school lunch: the chicken nuggets, the greasy crackerbread pizza, the nacho cheeze products, and the mozzarella sticks. But it’s the former question that matters most if school lunch is going to change—and that is precisely where Lunch Line, Uji Films’s ambitious new documentary that premiered in mid-May, makes its mark.
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