The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table

Chapter 6 takes places in Detroit, which, as McMillan tells us, has become a food desert, meaning it does not have enough grocery stores for its population. On average, Detroiters have roughly 25% less grocery store space than the standard for the industry. Many residents purchase food at liquor and convenience stores, McMillan says, noting that in Detroit, 13% of food stamps are used at convenience stores. In some ways, this state of affairs reflects the birth of supermarkets themselves, which were always intended for the suburbs. In modern-day Detroit, residents spend an estimated $200 million at suburban supermarkets. During her first few weeks in Detroit, hampered by an unemployment rate that is nearly twice the nationwide total, McMillan searches for a job at one of these suburban stores. 

While she searches for work, McMillan settles into her rented room in a neighborhood called Mexicantown and shops at a local grocer, where she’s surprised to find produce is cheaper than at Walmart. She tells us because produce can spoil, small grocers are more competitive, but when it comes to food that can be bought in massive quantities—namely, processed food—Walmart is far less expensive. Still, McMillan says these differences suggest that Walmart may not offer as much of a discount on food as it claims. 

Finally, McMillan gets a job stocking produce at a suburban Walmart, where much of her job consists of culling produce that has spoiled and “crisping” the rest—removing rotted parts so that it appears fresher. She confesses she’s not that confident assessing the quality of produce, a trait she says many Americans share. This decline in basic food literacy has led to the rise of packaged produce like bagged salads and pre-wrapped potatoes: “food companies saw that Americans were losing both time to cook and fluency in the kitchen, so they began offering ways to avoid using the kitchen at all” (157). 

At the close of the chapter, McMillan describes her frustration with a co-worker who expresses dismissive attitudes of the fieldworkers who picked the produce they’re stocking and who hopes a crackdown on illegal immigration will force farmers to pay higher wages, a hope McMillan knows—although she can’t say so without raising questions about her identity—is likely unrealistic.

McMillan continues to stock produce at Walmart, observing an increasing degree of dysfunction the longer she works there, such as the leak that’s hindering the functioning of the store’s refrigeration systems, leading to vast quantities of produce rotting away. Dealing with rotting food, from completely spoiled produce to food that’s no longer appealing enough to be sold, is an unending task. Spoiled food must be inventoried, and the workload increases after Walmart introduces a composting program during McMillan’s tenure.

McMillan next describes a different sort of produce distribution: wholesale markets. She heads to such a market, called the Terminal market, with the distributor for an independent grocer that’s started an initiative to help small stores stock produce, fueled by the 2010 creation of a food voucher than can only be spent on fruits and vegetables. Conspicuously absent from the market are buyers from any of the large supermarket chains, including Walmart, as they have for the most part their own distribution systems for produce. At another wholesale market known as Eastern Market, McMillan observes that despite Detroit’s reputation as a food desert, there’s plenty of food available; it’s the distribution of food, via suburban supermarkets, that’s created issues of access.

Eastern Market is just one place where McMillan finds low-income people who care about what they eat, despite their meager resources. This is everywhere in evidence in the form of Detroit’s community gardens, McMillan says, some of which have become so productive they’ve formed a cooperative known as Grown in Detroit that sells produce to local restaurants and supermarkets. McMillan describes a smaller initiative, called D-town farms, a four-acre plot founded to provide access to fresh, chemical-free produce while using vacant land and encouraging self-sufficiency in Detroit’s black community. McMillan cites research that suggests that small farms like D-town could produce all of Detroit’s produce while using just 12% of its vacant land.

As McMillan nears the end of her time at Walmart, she goes grocery shopping in the store where she works for the first time. Even though she stocks the produce, she says she’s surprised by how much of it isn’t fresh and is lower in quality than that of her neighborhood store. Shortly thereafter, McMillan quits, having been reassured by her assistant manager that Walmart will go on without her.