This is disgusting

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McMillan was in San Francisco on her book tour when Limbaugh set her in his crosshairs. She had no advance warning that her book was going to be featured on “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” and only became aware, she tells me, when someone tweeted at her to say he was talking about it. “It’s totally bizarre,” she says. “I had no idea that Rush Limbaugh knew that I existed. My grandmother would be thrilled, because she’s a fan of his.”

Less thrilling to her was Limbaugh attacking her for being female, single and educated. “It just didn’t really occur to me that my being single would have any bearing on whether whether my book was valid,” she says. “It seems to be a way to dismiss my intelligence or capacity to do the work.”

McMillan grew up working class in a rural area outside Flint, Michigan. It was Limbaugh country, she says.

“It’s interesting — I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and we actually watched his talk show in my high school [back when it was televised] for a class on current events. So I’m familiar with the politics. I certainly don’t think they’re foreign or alien or weird.

“But this really intense dismissal of women by someone like Rush Limbaugh, who’s considered an authority by a lot of people — that, to me, is distressing. I just wasn’t expecting anybody to say flat out that my work wasn’t valid because I’m a single woman.”

She also takes exception to Limbaugh’s calling her “over-educated.” “I only have a B.A. I don’t have an advanced degree,” she says. “Maybe he thinks women shouldn’t go to college at all?”

My name is Tracie McMillan. I live in Brooklyn, but I'm proud to say that I grew up in Michigan, about an hour from one of my favorite cities—Detroit. My dad was a lawnmower salesman and my mom had an English degree, and they moved us to Holly, a rural town outside of Flint, for good schools and open space. I was the oldest of three girls, and helped out at home when my mom fell ill around the time I was 7. The insurance company didn't want to pay for her care, so when she got too ill to live at home, she bounced between institutions that would hold off on charging us until the insurance company settled. She left our home when I was 12; we lost the case with the health insurance company when I was 14; and she died when I was 16.

My first job, at 14, was making caramel apples at an apple orchard. At 16, I got a job at Big Boy, stocking the salad bar before moving on to waitress. At 17, I got a generous but partial scholarship to NYU, moved to New York City, and cobbled together the rest of my tuition and living expenses as a tutor, nanny, waitress, personal assistant and intern; at one point I simultaneously juggled five part-time jobs. I stayed here because I landed in a rent-stabilized apartment that kept the city affordable.

I kept tutoring and freelancing until I wrangled myself a job at City Limits as managing editor. I was a copy editor, photo editor, office manager and deadline nag, and in my free time I started writing stories about the things that interested me: welfare, child care, anything, really, about how working families eked out a living. I'm proud, and a little shocked, that I've now won several national awards, including the Harry Chapin Media Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and have been recognized by the James Beard Foundation, for my work on these topics. Even though I'm not on staff at a big, fancy magazine or newspaper, the awards put my work in the same league as the publications I beat to win them: the New York Times, Fortune, Businessweek and Time.

Over time, my work has appeared in a wide range of publications including the New York Times, Harper's, Slate, Saveur, Salon and Gastronomica. In October 2012, I was named a Senior Fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. (It's unpaid, but the title helps). My first book, The American Way of Eating, a nonfiction project examining food and class in America, was published by Scribner in February 2012.

I am represented by Rebecca Friedman at Hill Nadell Literary Agency in Los Angeles.

* * * * *

Please note: I share personal details here not because my childhood is anyone's business but because, as a white woman who went to college, the default presumption is that I am elite. While my income is also nobody's business, I can tell you that I have lived well into the bottom third of America's income brackets the bulk of my adult life, and my fellowship, as noted below, is unpaid.

Someone just needs to tell Rush right about now that he's only allowed to criticize the ideas of white Anglo-saxon men from now on; anyone else is in the moral infallibility cart.

Someone just needs to tell Rush right about now that he's only allowed to criticize the ideas of white Anglo-saxon men from now on; anyone else is in the moral infallibility cart.

It isn't about him "criticizing the ideas" but him acting like an as*hole. It appears that according to Rush a woman's place is making and raising babies. Why else would he point out this woman's "singleness" and "over-education" as an insult? I know people on the right cried foul when bloggers and talking heads on the left made thinly veiled sexist remarks regarding Sara Palin.

Someone just needs to tell Rush right about now that he's only allowed to criticize the ideas of white Anglo-saxon men from now on; anyone else is in the moral infallibility cart.

Someone just needs to tell Rush right about now that he's only allowed to criticize the ideas of white Anglo-saxon men from now on; anyone else is in the moral infallibility cart.

What if you can’t afford nine-dollar tomatoes? That was the question award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan couldn’t escape as she watched the debate about America’s meals unfold, one that urges us to pay food’s true cost—which is to say, pay more. So in 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters.
From the fields of California, a Walmart produce aisle outside of Detroit, and the kitchen of a New York City Applebee’s, McMillan takes us into the heart of America’s meals. With startling intimacy she portrays the lives and food of Mexican garlic crews, Midwestern produce managers, and Caribbean line cooks, while also chronicling her own attempts to live and eat on meager wages. Along the way, she asked the questions still facing America a decade after the declaration of an obesity epidemic: Why do we eat the way we do? And how can we change it? To find out, McMillan goes beyond the food on her plate to examine the national prio-rities that put it there. With her absorbing blend of riveting narrative and formidable investigative reporting, McMillan takes us from dusty fields to clanging restaurant kitchens, linking her work to the quality of our meals—and always placing her observations in the context of America’s approach not just to farms and kitchens but to wages and work.

Short story - government spends like a drunken sailor, fed prints money to monetize debt, prices of everything go up wildly while wages largely stay the same (add in gas prices going up from fuel purchases from China adding to the fuel costs in agriculture). Coincidences? Methinks not.