Tracie McMillan talks about her new book and how she went undercover
as a farmhand and worker at Walmart and Applebee's.
February 23, 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. Sound grim? It is,
at times, but McMillan's lively narrative and evident empathy for
the people she encounters make her sojourn into the bowels of Big
Food and Big Ag a pleasure to read.
From the fields of California's
Central Valley to the produce aisle of a Michigan Walmart, and
lastly, the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebee's, McMillan gives a
firsthand account of the long hours, lousy wages and difficult
conditions that are par for the course in these places. This is
tricky terrain for a white, relatively privileged middle-class
American woman, and McMillan navigates it with grace and humility,
remaining acutely aware of the pitfalls inherent in such a project.
I sat down with McMillan
recently to chat about her populist odyssey and found her to be just
as down-to-earth and plucky as her prose.
Kerry Trueman: What was
the hardest part of going undercover?
Tracie McMillan: This was the
first time I had gone undercover to do work like that, because I
believe very strongly in the importance of being upfront with people
about what you're doing and who you are and I am not a good actress
(laughs). So the place where I was culturally the least good of a
fit, in the fields, I was really protected by the fact that I didn't
speak the language. I just seemed like a kind of dumb white girl,
and that was really helpful.
The first thing was getting
over my anxiety over doing that kind of project and coming to terms
with it. It meant that I had to be dishonest with my coworkers. I
don't really care so much that I'm not honest with the companies.
It's very interesting, the same year that I was working at Walmart
during the holiday season, Stephanie Rosenbloom at the New York
Times went and worked for a day at a Walmart with the company's
permission, and she had a very different experience than I did.
And that's why you do it.
Companies and supervisors do not treat you the same, and coworkers
won't be as honest with you, or as open. I've come out of this very
convinced that undercover work is worthwhile, but it's a complicated
thing. There's a tendency to think "I can totally do this, and how
else can I get this information?" but I also understand why people
react badly to it sometimes.
So there was the undercover
thing, and then there was finding the right balance between my
narrative and talking about the people I was with. It's not supposed
to be about me as a white girl having that experience; the idea is
that I can only tell my story and what I observed, but I'm using
that to get to the stories of the other people around me.
KT: You found that farm
work in California's Central Valley was extremely demanding,
sometimes dangerous, and routinely underpaid. What do you think it
would take to provide the people who pick our crops with better
working conditions and paychecks that don't deliberately shortchange
them?
TM: I was typically working
alongside undocumented immigrants. You always hear the stories about
how undocumented immigrants work for very low wages and how they get
treated. It's one thing to hear about it, it's another thing to see
how terrified everybody is, how unwilling they are to say anything.
They complained about it
outside of work, we'd talk about how bad the wages were and the
women were like, "Why don't you say anything?" For me that was
really awkward, because I wanted to say "That's terrible, and I will
march off and I will fix everything!" Which is not something you can
do as an undercover reporter.
Even if you're undocumented,
you still have legal rights, but they don't necessarily know that.
And even the ones that do, it's not like they have a guaranteed job,
you could be hired or fired at any moment. There's no job
security. So, you keep working, and at least you have the stability
of knowing that you will get your eight hours of work for which
you're paid $25 to $40. How do you fix that? You enforce the
existing labor laws. You don't necessarily need new ones. I think
it's important not to stifle businesses' ability to do their job,
but I did observe when I was working in the fields that every week I
was asked to sign a piece of paper stating that I had taken food
safety training that I had never taken.
And one of the arguments
around food safety is that farmers should be allowed to
self-regulate that. I saw in my work that self-regulation wasn't
working. And in terms of labor law enforcement, you need some sense
that people are going to get in trouble if they cheat workers. The
average fine levied under the Agricultural Worker Protection Act is
about $350. During my time in the fields I was underpaid by about
$500.
A farm advocate in Ohio
explained to me that it's cheaper to violate the law and pay when
someone complains than it is to follow the law.
KT: Can you even
imagine how different conditions would have to be for it to not be
an anomaly to have someone with your own background choosing that
kind of work?
TM: That's called unionization
and massive social change! Factory work in the early 20th century
was really dangerous and it didn't pay very well, but those became
really good jobs because there was unionization and legislation to
protect workers. My grandfather raised my mother and her two
brothers and took care of my grandmother on the salary he earned
working for Ford.
So, if you could figure out a
way to make farm labor a better job in terms of wages and working
conditions, more people would do it. The reason why people don't do
farm labor isn't because they're, like, "Oh, we're too good to be in
the fields," it's because it's really hard work that often doesn't
pay minimum wage. Picking up garbage is a shitty job, too, but
people still go do that, because it's a decent gig.
KT: What were your
most miserable moments?
TM: This belies my upwardly
mobile aspirations (laughs). For me, what was the most emotionally
miserable was working the night shift at Walmart. I didn't see any
daylight for the most part. That's also really physical work, so I
would move half a ton of sugar and a half ton of flour in a night,
by myself. It's isolated work, you're in an aisle stocking by
yourself, so there's no social aspect to it.
But what I found most draining
about it was that most of my coworkers, many of whom were married
and had families, had been there for seven, 10, 15 years. One
coworker was earning $11 an hour after working there for seven
years, and she talked about how if you worked at Walmart for 15
years that's actually really good because you get a lifetime
discount card.
There's something really
sobering when what you're aspiring to is that if you stick it out at
$10, $11, $12 an hour you're going to get a lifetime 10-percent
discount card.
KT: Walmart keeps
touting its commitment to fresh healthy produce, but in your
experience, they treated fresh fruits and vegetables just like any
other non-perishable consumer good. Their blasé attitude toward the
fresh produce engendered so much waste! How do you square that with
their famous obsession for maximizing profit?
TM: I was really shocked to
be working at Walmart and to see how inefficient the place I was
working was. I have no idea if that department was just an anomaly,
or if that's a broader problem.
Randy, the manager, was
incredibly young, didn't really know what he was doing, and didn't
particularly care. For that, I would fault the store management.
It's one thing to be really bad at your job, but why did somebody
give you that job?
What was really upsetting to
me was that one of my colleagues, I think I call him Sam in the
book, who's a black man, he had come to Walmart after the grocery
store he worked at closed down. He had been working in produce for
five years and knew a lot, so I could ask him anything, like "How do
I tell if this is ripe?" Sam had applied for that job and they had
given it to Randy instead. I have no idea who on the planet would
have picked Randy over Sam, because Sam knew produce, whereas Randy
had a background in electronics.
KT: You write, "When
cooking instruction is paired with basic nutrition education,
Americans cook more and eat more healthfully--even when money is
tight." What's your prescription for battling kitchen illiteracy?
TM: Almost everything people
are eating at home involves some degree of convenience foods. That
kind of thing usually tends to have a lot of salt and preservatives
in it. But it's actually no more time-intensive to do a Hamburger
Helper kind of thing from scratch, and it's actually cheaper.
The thing that sucks about a
box isn't that it's quick--it's that if you don't already know how
to cook, you think you can't make a cake without a box. We need to
start thinking about cooking as a basic life skill, not something
that's optional. Incorporating that into public education to me
seems like a smart idea. It can be a really great way to teach
people other stuff. It's great for math, right? And for reading
comprehension. Or learning to write recipes. It's an important
survival skill.
I think one of the things you
can support, no matter what your politics are, is that our schools
should be teaching our kids how to be self-sufficient, how to take
care of themselves and not to have to depend on large institutions.
I would include in that not just government but also corporations.
We don't want to be raising
kids who depend on corporations to tell them what to eat and how to
eat. That's a really important part of American culture. People talk
all the time about a nanny state, but there's the corporate nanny,
too. And I don't like that either! If we want people to be
self-sufficient, cooking and eating is a part of that. So, we need
to include cooking as part of public school education. I also
understand fully the difficulty of educational reform, but I think
it's an important point to start discussing.
Buy a copy of Tracie McMillan's book through our partnership
with Powell's Books.
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