In the opening paragraph of The American Way of Eating, McMillan situates the reader in a neighborhood grocery store in Brooklyn. She just observed a cockroach falling into the meat slicer, and the produce was less than fresh. As unappealing as the grocery store was, McMillan continued to shop there, constrained by her limited budget and lack of time or energy to go anywhere else.

McMillan explains how her indifference to her meals dated back to her childhood. Raised in a small town in Michigan, McMillan describes how meals typically consisted of processed food such as Tuna Helper or Miracle Whip, and that home-cooked food from local farms “wasn’t for people like us” (2). This attitude carried into her adult life, as she relegated a preoccupation with healthy food to the domain of upper-class snobs.

In the next section, however, McMillan explains how meeting Vanessa, a teenager who takes a cooking class focused on health and farming, changes her perspective. Vanessa lives in a neighborhood where junk food is abundant. She wants to improve her diet but faces an almost insurmountable cost in doing so. Inspired by Vanessa’s paradox, McMillan sets out to investigate how the features of American society, ranging from the lack of access to supermarkets in poor neighborhoods to a lack of social programming, force low-income families to choose cheaper, processed food.