Civil Eats • March 1, 2012
Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table takes us on a vivid and poignant tour of a place we don’t really want to go: the mostly hidden, sometimes horrible world of the workers who form the backbone of our cheap, industrialized food chain.
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!
@Epicurious gives #AWE a nice shout out. Thanks, @sarabonisteel! http://ow.ly/9lJwf
Absolutely worth reading this Wall Street Journal review from Aram Bakashian. He enjoyed the book but finds most of the research specious. Basically: As long as Ms. McMillan concentrates on what she actually saw and did, she has an interesting story to tell and she tells it well…But she does have an unfortunate weakness for … Read more
great write up (and pitch-perfect critique) of #AWE over @MetroNewYork from @Vmanapat http://ow.ly/9k8xT
From Susan Ager’s thoughtful review of The American Way of Eating for Minneapolis’ Star Tribune: these pages will leave you with vivid, challenging images of how food is harvested, sold and prepared (loosely speaking) at casual restaurants
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