‘The Man’ vs. Food

Broadly speaking, the right tends to see government (the public sector) as oppressive to freedom, and the left tends to see corporations (the private sector) that way. Therefore, many leftists think that society’s dietary woes are the fault of what they call “Big Food,” “the food system,” “The Man,” etc. The Rainforest Action Network recently held an Occupy Our Food Supply Day to “confront corporate control of our food supply and take action to build healthy, accessible food systems for all.”

Fight the system, man!

The Occupy Our Food Supply actions included setting up a “seed bank” in front of a Bank of America (easy target), protesting Monsanto, and the ACORN-like tactic of turning a bank-owned lot into an urban garden. Hey, if the Occu-hippies want to plant a garden, fine—no corporation is going to stop them from planting their arugula, provided they do so legally.

By the way, one of the celebs involved with Occupy Our Food Supply is Willie Nelson, who we last noticed wearing his food-activist hat making commercials for Chipotle, a restaurant chain which until 2009 was owned by big, bad McDonald’s. We suspect Nelson is more worried about his weed supply than the food supply. (Or maybe he thinks weed is food?)

The corporate food system is also the focus of a buzzed-about new book by journalist Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. The book is a critique of America’s food culture along the lines of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. As part of her “groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America,” McMillan labored as a field worker in California, but also did two jobs that millions of average Americans do in their high school or college years: working at Walmart and Applebee’s.

While working in an Applebee’s kitchen, this intrepid reporter discovered that manual labor is, like, hard. McMillan writes: “Let’s be clear: I’m no pro. For one thing, I don’t have the hands for it, a function of not yet having enough calluses. My hands are so tender that I yelp in pain regularly during service …” Yes, a lot of us have been there, done that, and we didn’t even have a book deal. This sheltered thirty-something reporter also dwells on the non-news that Applebee’s customers are mainly middle-class families while its workers are mainly lower-class. It even turns out that many food workers are immigrants!

Spoiler: the author doesn't entirely approve of America's way of eating.

The author’s liberal obsession with class and general naivete show through in other ways. “Ms. McMillan seems genuinely puzzled by the fact that high-crime, low-income areas, like many of the neighborhoods in Detroit, are ‘underserved’ by supermarket chains and food merchants in general,” write Walt Street Journal critic Aram Bakshian Jr. in his review of the book. “But surely the scarcity of supermarkets in such areas—like the blocks of boarded-up, abandoned housing, the neglected, underperforming schools and the corrupt local authorities—are surface symptoms of an underlying social dysfunction …You don't have to be a Nobel economist to understand that bad neighborhoods are likely to attract bad stores or no stores at all.” This reality helps explain the existence of what progressives call “food deserts.”

Bakshian also notes the irony that McMillan suggests that a Henry Ford mass-production approach to food might change the way America eats. “Only it has already happened.  Stripped-down, mass-produced ‘affordable,’ ‘convenient’ food turned out en masse—like the Model T—by laborers rather than craftsmen is exactly what Ms. McMillan encountered at every step along her journey from a California garlic field to a Midwestern big-box store and a New York family-style restaurant. She deplored it all.”

The book gets a more sympathetic review in the L.A. Times, although reviewer Carolyn Kellogg finds that “McMillan's efforts to tell macro and micro stories never cohere into a complete picture.” Also, Kellogg is strangely provoked by a seemingly innocent element of McMillan’s accounts, “I'm no food saint, but I want to shake her for drinking soda everywhere she goes.” Wow, you just can’t escape the soda haters these days. Someone needs to write a book about that.