Book of the week: The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields, and the Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan

What prevents so many Americans from eating healthful, locally produced food? The author went undercover to find out.

(Scribner, $25)

With each passing year, the message that we should all be eating healthful, locally produced foods grows “louder and more insistent,” said Katie Bacon in The Boston Globe. Food journalist Tracie McMillan would never argue against such advice, but she wanted to find out what prevents so many Americans from following it. Looking for answers, she went undercover in the food industry. In California, she picked grapes and garlic with immigrant workers for $153 a week. At a Detroit Walmart, she took a job reanimating limp vegetables so they could remain on the shelves. At an Applebee’s in Brooklyn, she filled meal orders by microwaving prepackaged foods. No matter where she worked as a low-paid food-industry drone, she had neither the time nor the money to eat healthfully.

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McMillan’s proposed solutions may be idealistic and flawed, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times, but she has “a voice the food world needs.” A blue-collar girl who happily devoured Tuna Helper and Ortega Taco Dinners while growing up, she’s clearly not a snob, and she also has a sense of humor. More importantly, her observations about food and class are valid and passionate, and she has taken serious physical risks to learn how all Americans might have the opportunity to eat better. The American Way of Eating is “lighted from within by anger at the poor food options many in this country face.” Once you read it, you’ll be angry, too.