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

(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.

To a “privileged reformer” like the author, perhaps that counts as news, said Michael Stern in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sure, her adventures do provide a few surprises: In Detroit, she watches truckloads of Michigan produce arrive at inner-city distribution centers, only to be shipped out to the suburbs because the city doesn’t have a single chain supermarket. (Many Detroit residents survive instead on processed foods from convenience stores.) But rather than letting her reporting spark new thinking about food solutions, McMillan merely supplies fresh grist for fellow elites who are already convinced that private enterprise is evil, that workers and consumers are powerless victims, and that Applebee’s broccoli is overcooked. She eventually even urges that government recognize fresh food as a human right and establish what she terms “a public food infrastructure.” Perhaps she’s forgotten that socialized food production never worked very well in the Soviet Union.

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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.