American journalist Tracie McMillan has focused her career on writing about social equity; since the 1990s, she has written about poverty in New York City and across the United States. While working for the magazine City Limits, she reported on a cooking class, and this experience prompted an interest in the relationship between class and food. She spent all of 2009 undercover in various aspects of the American food system in order to write The American Way of Eating.

McMillan is the author of the book but also its protagonist. Having grown up in a small town in Michigan, raised by an effectively single father, McMillan had a childhood diet of processed food, supplemented by the homemade pie crusts her grandmother taught her to make; later on, she learned to cook elaborate meals while working as a nanny in New York. This personal experience grants McMillan insight into the factors at play in how people choose the food they eat, and it helps her establish a bond with the people she meets throughout her investigation.

McMillan’s tenacity and curiosity as a reporter also shape the course of the investigation laid out in the book. By immersing herself in the environments in which food is produced and distributed, McMillan is not only undertaking the journey along with the reader; she’s also highlighting the degree to which much of the work that goes into putting food on people’s plates is hidden, since it takes an investigative reporter going undercover to draw out this information.