Every once in a while, a book really makes you sit up and take notice of the inequities in the world around us. I wish I had thought to write Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001). On the other hand, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to leave my home behind (along with my ID, my checkbook and my credit cards) and spend a year working in some of the country’s lowest paid jobs. But having been a maid and worked almost every possible restaurant position except dishwasher and high-end cook while in my teens and twenties, I sure could relate to what she wrote. The fact that conditions are worse for most of the people working these menial positions than they ever were for me made me want to run up and hug the nearest worker-bee I saw.
A new arrival, The American Way of Eating takes up where Nickel and Dimed left off. Author Tracie MacMillan, who has written for such prestigious food journals as Saveur, decided to go undercover at places that grow or sell food to the nation’s working poor. Whether picking grapes, peaches and garlic in California fields, trying to make tired, second-rate produce look fresh at a Walmart in Detroit or working in the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebees, she writes of dismal working conditions, of trying (often unsuccessfully) to make ends meet on wages that are too skimpy, and of the substandard food that is sold to those of us in the country at the bottom of the economic ladder.
“What would it take for us all to eat well?” she asks. The answer includes looking beyond the fare on our tables to the conglomerate behind the food. As a New York Times review says, MacMillan “delivers a brutal takedown of corporations that, in her view, pretend on their sunny Web sites to treat workers well but in practice use labor contractors that often cheat them. She names names. Here’s looking at you, the Garlic Company in Bakersfield, Calif.”
In short, MacMillan’s book challenges corporate America’s priorities of profit over people. I’ll drink to that.
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