Tracie McMillan, an investigative journalist who lives in Bed-Stuy, spent several years living and working with the people who plant, pick, stock, sell and cook our food for her eye-opening recent book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. From the garlic fields of California, to the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart, to the busy kitchen of an Applebee’s in Brooklyn, she took a long hard look at our food system from a variety of angles that few of us ever get to see.

It seems more than fitting to bring you an interview with McMillan on May Day–International Worker’s Day, as well as a pagan celebration of spring, and the growing season to come. We spoke to her over the phone, some weeks ago, while she was traversing California on book tour. Add it to your summer reading list, reserve it at the library, or support a journalist and buy The American Way of Eating today–you’ll never look at food, and the workers we depend on to stay fed, the same way again.

The thing that shocked me most in The American Way of Eating is that we don’t actually grow enough fruits and vegetables. I had NEVER thought about it that way.
Right? That’s crazy! We actually don’t have as a nation–not just as individuals–we just don’t grow enough fruits and vegetables. We grow plenty of corn and soy, more than we need, but not the stuff that we should be eating so that we’re all basically healthy. That’s nuts! That’s built into all the policies and the investments we’re making in the public sector. There’s ways to change that. And there are ways to do that in a way that engages private enterprise and makes it profitable for private enterprise to grow that kind of stuff instead of endless, endless, endless rows of corn that are going into cattle feed and ethanol.

We’ve had all this great food journalism, from people like Michael Pollan, documenting the fact that we grow too much corn, for feed and fuel and junk food, and as a result we have a surplus of calories. But to think that we actually have a deficit of good calories is another thing altogether.
No wonder, we’re all eating crap, right? We just don’t have enough. I see a tendency toward conspiracy theory, that the big agrobusiness is sitting there and they’re manipulating everything, and there’s that, and lobbyists and corporate power to be concerned about. But the more that I did this research, it must have seemed perfectly sensible, in the mid-20th century. Food had never been something that could make you sick before–why would it? If you had said, oh, but if you eat this other type of food it will make you sick, that would have seemed like crazy talk in 1940.

What are people not getting about the intersection of diet and poverty and health in this country?
The problem of people’s diets is much bigger than just access. It’s a lot about time. And anyone who cares about food, if they’re serious about it being more than just a luxury thing, for them to enjoy, if people are really serious about food being a community issue, a social issue, we have to start having a conversation about wages and work life. It’s really hard to pay enough money to buy really healthy food if you’re spending a quarter to a third of your budget on food already, which is what the bottom third of America, by income bracket, already does.
Read More »

Aside from cooking professionally, Elizabeth Thacker Jones has worked in nearly every other capacity with food. She helped “eating designer” Marije Vogelvang create the Go Slow Cafe on Governors Island, operated solely by senior citi... Read More »

Copies of Tazewell's Favorite Eccentric, by zinester Sarah Rose.

Last year, Kate Angell and her friend Elvis Bakaitis held a feminist zine reading at Bluestockings on the Lower East Side. Like Alison Piepmeier’s 2009 book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, the reading shed light on DIY feminist publications, but it was focused on zines that are being made and read right now, despite the advent of that other easy, cheap way to share stories–the Internet. The event was packed and droves of attendees came up to Angell and Bakaitis afterward to thank them for featuring feminist-specific zines.

The success of the reading and the thriving zine scene that it revealed led the pair to organize the first-ever Feminist Zinefest NYC, which will be held at The Brooklyn Commons this Saturday, February 25. From 1 to 6 pm, you can check out 30 different zines and meet the makers behind the photocopies and collages, for free.

Kate Angell, reference librarian, Feminist Zinefest NYC collaborator.

Underground zines–handmade, photocopied booklets covering everything from punk rock to science fiction–have been around since the ’60s. In the ’90s, zines were often love letters to punk bands that were handed out at rock shows, written by men and women alike, with a strong feminist and Riot Grrrl subculture existing within the larger zinester landscape. Zines today are still handmade booklets that are photocopied and bound with staples, but many feminist zines have become more specific in their subject matter, and there are now online forums  where readers and makers discuss and distribute zines from all over the world.
Read More »

It took Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley seven years to film their Atlantic Yards documentary, Battle for Brooklyn, but only about as many seconds to find out that it had been shortlisted for an Academy Award. Now that the subject of eminent domain may very well share the stage with sequins and tuxedos at the Kodak Theatre at the Oscars on February 26 (official nominees will be announced January 24), Atlantic Yards-inspired art has finally gained traction with viewers and critics alike, in New York and nationwide. Read More »