Three reviews went up this weekend, and the two I can access are generous almost to a fault.
First up: China Millman at the Pittsburg Post-Gazette apparently felt that Dwight Garner didn’t go far enough. I’m literally speechless after reading her generous review:
The American Way of Eating’: Food, our inglorious food
Tracie McMillan details, with precision and humanity, what ails our national nutritional regime…This combination of the factual and the personal breathes life into dry economic terms such as “changes in market share” and “supply chain efficiencies,” providing a sense of what they mean in the lives of real people….The next time Alice Waters suggests poor people should buy local vegetables instead of sneakers — or, in other words, that poor people just don’t have the right priorities —I hope someone hands her a copy of “The American Way of Eating.’
an indictment of America’s industrial food system and a vivid, compassionate portrait of the working class.
I can’t access the review from the Washington Spectator, but those of you who can should click through to its review, entitled:
Kitchen Nightmares: If you want people to eat healthy, why make it so expensive?” So asks a Brooklyn teenager in the question at the heart of Tracie McMillan’s ambitious The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table.
Thank you so much to the reviewers, and book fans: Go check them out, comment, etc.!