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Fitness Files: The American way may shock you

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Haunting the nonfiction aisle at Newport Beach’s libraries, I discover topics I never knew interested me — early submariners, distance swimmers, psychopaths, John Wilkes Booth’s escape, beating Las Vegas casinos, venturesome entrepreneurs.

My latest find was Tracie McMillan’s “The American Way of Eating.”

Here’s a journalist who works through our food supply from field to grocery store to restaurant, living on minimum wage or less. A good storyteller and an exhaustive researcher, McMilllan looks to answer the question: Does everyone in America have access to healthy, fresh food?

Planning to work two months at each job, she starts in California’s Central Valley picking grapes and garlic, but soon her right arm is in such pain that she cannot use it. Labor contractors cheat her — paying by the piece, not by the hour, far less than minimum wage.

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A community of field workers helps her pick and feeds her along with their families. She leaves the job, disabled by the hard, repetitive work, but grateful for the shared beans, rice and food bank offerings.

Next, she stocks produce in a Detroit Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.

Walmart’s purchase of fruit and vegetables in tremendous quantities causes delays, so produce spoils. McMillan revives it by stripping slimy leaves and plumping limp vegetables in a warm water bath.

She finds Walmart’s prices as much as 50% higher than fresher produce at a neighborhood store. So she asks the question: With Walmart eliminating competition, where’s its motivation to keep prices down?

Walmart’s minimum-wage workers can’t afford quality fresh produce, but they clean out Walmart’s rejects on Free Food Fridays.

McMillan’s last move is to New York, where Applebee’s hires her as an expediter, garnishing plates and adding sauces just before servers whisk them out to customers. The breakneck pace is topped only by her realization that every dish comes precooked and plastic-wrapped.

The Applebee’s kitchen is a finishing factory, reheating packaged portions, leaving plastic flakes on food. Applebee’s managers promote her to $9 an hour, although payment shenanigans again claim some of her gains.

McMillan is adventurous. She joins the cooks in a hard-drinking goodbye party where someone drugs her, leading to an ugly sexual assault. She reports it to no avail. Witnesses will not help.

Her book, supported by pages of footnotes and tables documenting her wages and expenditures, demonstrates why the working poor can’t afford quality food. Besides, their neighborhoods have liquor stores, not supermarkets.

She finds some hope. Urban farming programs are popping up, food stamps can be used at farmers markets in some states and the U.S. Department of Agriculture supports transporting food to urban areas.

I pulled “The American Way of Eating” off the shelf at Newport’s main library, expecting to learn about regional recipes. Instead, I got a sociological analysis along with some muckraking.

A report pegged the U.S. poverty in 2014 at between 14% and 16% of the population.

Peaches, kale and homegrown tomatoes fill my larder. MacMillan gave me a peek into the lives of working people whose fresh food cupboards are bare.

Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK is a retired teacher who ran the Los Angeles Marathon at age 70, winning first place in her age group. Her blog is lazyracer@blogspot.com.

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