Author Interviews

McMillan asks why the distribution of good, healthy food — easy access to which she considers a human right — is so often left to private companies, begging us to change the conversation from one about what people eat (she thinks that given the choice, people will eat relatively healthily) to one about healthy food’s accessibility.

Over the phone, McMillan explained her project’s goals, and shared insights from her experiences as an embedded food journalist.

One of the arguments you make throughout the book is that food is a “social good” and a human right. You sometimes even cite the Founding Fathers and their desires in the course of your argument. What’s the basis for that? Do you think everyone would agree that healthy food is a right the Founding Fathers thought all Americans deserved?

That’s more of a rhetorical flourish, I think, than anything that’s enshrined in the Constitution or any founding documents. But it refers to a very different time in America’s history. The Founding Fathers weren’t living at a time when you could possibly have thought that food would be this weird stuff that came in boxes and you pulled off shelves, the way you do now. That model didn’t exist — supermarkets didn’t exist until 1930. So I think the idea that getting fresh, fairly healthy food would be difficult or unusual anywhere would not have occurred to them.

Obviously, diet has always correlated somewhat with social class. I have a quote in the book somewhere, from Jefferson, about how there’s less fresh food in the diet of the poor than that of the rich. He says that this is bad (but he says it in a much more beautiful and thoughtful way than that). I think when you have Founding Fathers talking about [that state of affairs] being unconscionable, and not being what they’re going for when they’re building the founding premises for the nation, and when you look at how our food system has changed over time, it’s reasonable to say that none of them would be particularly happy with the fact that, in a country that’s as rich as the U.S., fresh and healthy food is seen as a luxury, as opposed to something that everybody has a right to and has access to.

To the extent that any of us accept government, we accept that government has a responsibility to ensure really basic parts of human existence to its citizens. Water, roads, electricity — we spend time and energy and money on the part of public entities to make sure that everybody has access to these things. And yet we’ve left food entirely to the private market. We have lots of food in lots of places, but there’s very little fresh and healthy food in some places, and that’s mostly because supermarkets have one set of incentives to succeed, and they don’t always line up with making sure we all have really healthy food. When we expand cities, we put in water lines and electricity lines — and the government will make sure that that happens and it’s not too expensive — but when it comes to food, we say, “Oh, whatever, we’ll just see what shows up.” And often what shows up is not great.

You make another, similar point in the book: that we make sure kids know how to read, but we don’t make sure they know how to cook.

Well, obviously, I think literacy is really, really important in terms of books …

But it doesn’t help you survive on the most basic level.

Right. Traditionally, we’ve thought the point of a school is to create a workforce. So we teach people all these workforce skills. That model evolved at a time when it was pretty common, at least for middle-class families, for women to stay home. Women would spend time and energy in the kitchen, cooking — and could then teach kids how to cook. Now, that’s not the norm. There are all these competing social and work pressures that make it really hard for folks to cook at home and to spend a lot of time on it; also, as there’s more and more academic pressure on kids to do all this stuff after school, there’s just less time for that kind of learning. If you’re going to start building a society where that stuff can’t very easily be taken care of at home, you need to start looking for [alternatives].

To me, cooking seems like one of those really basic skills that everybody should have; that’s part of literacy in terms of a broader sense of human existence. If we want people to eat healthfully and be engaged with their diets, the easiest way to do that is [by teaching them to cook], right? And then people can really be empowered to make decisions for themselves.

If you’re talking about a socioeconomic situation where people don’t have a lot of time to cook, and don’t necessarily have a lot of cooking knowledge, and you’re telling them they should be spending more time cooking, that’s not really fair. But if you’re creating a social fabric where there is lots of time and energy, that’s different. I draw some comparisons with the way industrialized nations in Europe structure their work and social time and vacation time. If I had five weeks’ guaranteed vacation every year, I’d be a lot more into canning the stuff out of my garden.

In each of the three places you lived and worked for the book, how representative would you say your experiences were?

It’s important for me to be very clear that, obviously, in a major sense, these experiences are only representative of what happens when I go and do what I did. Because, particularly in the farm work, I’m a white girl with papers — there’s no way the experience I had is entirely typical. I also write about this in the Applebee’s section: People were really excited and curious about having a white girl in the kitchen. There’s all this interesting stuff about being a white woman. It prompts exploitation, on some levels, but also a lot of protection and affection and curiosity … I do think that in communities where monetary resources are tight, people do a lot more for each other in terms of in-kind resources.

One point you make several times seems key to the discussion of healthy eating choices: When you’re working very hard, and you’re working a job that’s tiring, there’s an apathy that takes over and ultimately dictates the food you choose to eat. I think people in almost all circumstances will recognize that exhaustion and overwork leads them to be less careful with their diet. Is there an easy way of combating this?

I think you’re right that you’ll find this with everybody. Most people have been exhausted from working, no matter how rich they are. [When they hit that point,] they just think, “I don’t care what I eat.”

I do think that there’s a special quality to these very working-class jobs, though. I experienced this the most at Walmart, where you feel like you have so little control over anything in your life that it just seems ridiculous to say, “I’m going to be really positive and work really hard on my diet.”

This sounds a little touchy-feely, but one of the things that you need to have to eat well is a real drive to do it: a real sense that what you do matters, and your circumstances will change. When you’re working in these jobs where actually, you can work really, really, really hard, and your circumstances do not change, that sense of “I will work hard and nothing gets any better” pervades everything. You feel a kind of hopelessness setting in about everything in your life.

This is part of a larger argument that you’re making — that we can’t just change our attitude to food directly; we have to address all these other concerns before we get to the point where people choose what they’re going to eat.

Right. The deeper I got into doing this project, the more I began to believe that we shouldn’t just focus on talking about what we should be eating. My grandmother has been telling me since I was a kid, “Eat your vegetables.” I’ve found a lot of sustainable food stuff really inspiring and really exciting, but I really think that people already know about it. What we need to think about is, Why aren’t people doing it?

We’ve developed this approach to nutrition in the U.S. where we think that if you just tell people things in the right way, they’ll change their minds — that we need to persuade people to eat well. I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that you get a lot further by making it easy for people to make good decisions … If you make it easy for people to eat well, people mostly are going to do that. People are not running around saying, “I think diabetes is awesome and I want it.” Right now, it’s really easy to eat crappy food. So, why not make it easier not to?

Lastly, what would you say are the most surprising things — either alarming or encouraging — that you learned over the course of your experience?

There were two things that freaked me out the most. One was how totally unregulated farm labor is on the ground. I remember thinking, “Nobody is minding the shop here. Absolutely nobody.” I was getting paid completely illegal wages, and they were giving me paychecks that I could completely disprove if I felt like arguing about them. But even if anyone bothers to complain, the fines are really small — no one really cares.

The other alarming thing was the sense I got of the power of Walmart — how powerful a single company is in terms of our food system. They’re not just the ones selling the food; they’re the gatekeepers between farm and plate. They’re controlling the whole thing. It’s how they’ve brought prices down: not so much by pushing down producers’ prices, which they’ve done on manufactured goods a lot … more of the food price drop over time has been a drop in the price after the farm gate. We talk about the fact that banks are “too big to fail” — and that’s awful. But it scares me even more when we’re talking about food.

On the other hand, there were a bunch of things that I found really inspiring. I thought the generosity among the people that I worked and lived with everywhere was really amazing. There seems to be this myth — and this might be part of the way that I grew up — that everybody’s out there on their own: We’re individuals, and we just take care of our own stuff. But actually, people — particularly of limited means — are incredibly generous and kind, for the most part.

I came out of all of this feeling really hopeful. We can actually do this. This isn’t some huge monolith that’s impossible — we just have to decide that we want to take on the less sexy things. Let’s talk about food as part of infrastructure. If we could get people as excited about food infrastructure as they are about farmers’ markets, we’d get really far really fast.

Builders, be warned: This is not an instruction manual. Instead, Diedricksen’s book is bursting with abstract creative concepts, all outlined in eye-popping, full-page black-and-white comic-book-style drawings (you can see some examples — along with a number of photographs — in the slide show that accompanies this piece).

Over the phone, the author explained that, while small house fans shouldn’t necessarily look to him for step-by-step tutorials, his ideas (particularly his recycling tips) can be adapted in countless construction-related contexts. And you don’t have to be a tiny house fanatic to admire Diedricksen’s resourcefulness, or to wonder as you read — as the author himself wonders in his introduction — “how much space … you really, truly need to live well.”

This started out as a self-published project. How did it get picked up by a publisher?

I started selling the book out of my basement. Before that, I’d tried to get a children’s book published; I went through all the avenues, and spent a lot of money copying it and sending it out and all that, but it just never went anywhere. So I put this book together later, and hesitantly released it on my own, thinking that if anything it’d just be a gift for my brother or my father, or other like-minded people. I didn’t even pursue any publishers; I said, forget it — with the Internet and YouTube and all that, I’ll just try to push it on my own. And in a year and a half or so, I sold a couple thousand copies, just by word of mouth. There was a sort of snowball thing with the press; NPR was the first big media entity to cover [my work], and later I was covered by the New York Times and other organizations. That certainly helped move copies out of my basement.

Fast-forward a bit, and then, out of the blue, I had a couple of different publishers approach me. I never looked for any of them; they came to me. I already owned a ton of books from Lyons Press — they’ve done a lot of stuff with micro architecture, including many books that have influenced me — so choosing them was a no-brainer. I couldn’t even keep up with the book anymore anyway, so I [figured I'd] give it to someone else!

The illustrations really make this book stand out from other, similarly themed titles. You do have some experience as a comic book writer, right?

I used to do some comic strips. “Comic book writer” is kind of a misnomer; it was more just comic panels for a couple of Boston-area papers and magazines. I was one of those high school kids … I did well, but was always in the back of the classroom, never really paying attention, just doodling in my notebook the whole time. Eventually, I took that and tried to make it more constructive.

Why do you think tiny houses are so popular these days? Many people who probably wouldn’t ever build one for themselves seem to be fascinated — and there’s clearly a dedicated community devoted to actually making them.

I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is the economy. With the job situation the way it is, there are a lot of people looking for ways to cut costs, and wondering: “Why do I necessarily need this gigantic house I’m working 80 hours a week to pay for, to heat, to furnish, to maintain?” Bigger houses require much more of all of that. And a lot of people think, “If I can build a smaller house (or even just find a smaller house) to live in, I’m saving myself a ton of money.” I was talking recently to someone who brought up an interesting point — that if you have a smaller house, you’re more or less not allowed to spend more money on junk, because you just don’t have the room for it.

But there’s a whole creative aspect of it, too; there’s a building faction of people who [want to break with the mainstream] in these days of automation and having everything done for you. I did a speaking thing at MIT, and was talking to some of the people there. I said, “Why do you want me out here? You guys are geniuses; I’m this idiot who builds with plywood and recycles garbage.” One of them said that these days, people don’t do as many things with their hands — so what I’m doing is very foreign to them. They were just curious.

Do you think more people come at this movement from the creative perspective? Or because of their political or economic beliefs?

I think it’s a mix of all of them. There are a lot of people out there — I’m one, too — who don’t like to be told what to do. I do have a “normal” house (on the very small side). But when we were shopping for houses, I thought, you know, I really wish I had some really cool homemade, organically built (not in terms of organic cotton, or this and that — more like “free-flowing”) [place].

If you look at books by Lloyd Kahn, for instance, they have all these houses with almost hobbit-shaped rounded walls; they just have a more natural, comfortable feel to them, instead of looking like white-walled boxes. Half the stuff I build, I really don’t draw many plans; I just go out there, have some lumber, sit there, think about it and start just piecing stuff together to see where it takes me.

It seems like many of the houses in your book couldn’t be — and aren’t even meant to be — full-time residences.

There are a few in there that could be, actually. But, I mean, this is true of my videos, too; there are some people who misunderstand it to a certain degree. With my videos, I build these really tiny things, and they say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous; there’s no bathroom or guest bedroom; you can’t live in those.” I tell them to keep in mind that I need to deliver one video a month … Just take the recycled material ideas from this and apply them to a bigger dwelling that you design yourself. I’m just trying to convey the ideas. I’m all for small houses; I’m trying to push that too. But with some of these, I need to explain: Don’t take it at face value; just take some of these ideas and run with them. You can take them and make a 300-square-foot, very livable house. But in two weeks, I can only build something that’s 100 square feet or smaller. I don’t have the time, the money or the yard space for anything else.

Readers should know that this book doesn’t offer step-by-step instructions.

There are definitely a lot of educational elements, especially with recycled materials and construction approaches. I think there’s actually a ton crammed into it — especially visually. I want people to open it and have half a heart attack from the visual avalanche of sketches. Someone compared it to a “Where’s Waldo?” book.

In terms of step-by-step stuff, one publisher approached me and said, “We love the book, but we want step-by-step instructions for every design, and materials lists.” I said that would take me 10 years to do, and the book would have to be 3,000 pages long — because there are something like 60 different cabins in my book. I’d rather throw out a bunch of different varied and eclectic ideas in a hundred-odd-page book. If you wanted full plans and materials lists, there’d probably be four or five cabins in there, and that’s it.

At the end of your introduction, you pose the question: “How much space do you really, truly, need to live well?” How would you answer that question yourself?

The answer’s different for each person. I live in a house in the 1,000-square-foot or so range, but there are four of us and a huge dog. A lot of people say I don’t live in a small house, but it’s about a third of the U.S. average, which is almost 2,500 square feet — and I have quite a bit of stuff. I feel we have quite a bit of space, considering. There are people who live out there in 200-square-foot houses — but keep in mind, they’re by themselves; it’s a single person. So if you do the math, it equates, more or less.

My problem is that I have a lot of hobbies. I own a couple of drum sets; I do some musician stuff and play in a couple of bands. I need some space to store that kind of junk. I keep joking that in my second life I should take up the kazoo or the harmonica. It’d be much more space-efficient.

There’s really no set answer for this question, unfortunately.

How about in the abstract?

I think people could live comfortably enough — two, three people or even four — in a house that’s 500 square feet or less. And that’s a house with laundry in it. (For most Americans, a house has to have a washing machine and a dishwasher; people forget you can go to a laundromat if you want.) Even if you do want to plug all that stuff in, it could be very doable.

A lot of what prevents houses of this size are the codes in certain regions, unfortunately. People feel smaller houses are going to detract from the value of neighboring houses in certain communities — which isn’t really true. There’s a whole political thing behind it, but I won’t bore you with that.

Finally, are there one or two houses from the book that you’d like to single out as the most fun or unusual?

The one that most people — even some real-deal architects — seem to like the most is the “Inverted A-Frame.” I’m a fan of the A-Frame style, based on those cabins that were built as second homes in the ’50s, ’60s and before — and so for the heck of it, I said, “What if you just took it and flipped it upside down? What would happen? Why not?” I had never seen it done before, so I did a sketch of that, and I’ve gotten a great response from that. A couple of people said they wanted to build it, but I haven’t heard from them since.

There’s another one that’s really simple — it’s called “The Pimple” or “The Terrapin,” and it’s a tiny houseboat. I think it’s just a fun sketch; it’s got a giant squid attacking the boat. That’s one I actually haven’t built, but I want to build it at some point in time, and chronicle traveling up some marsh or river somewhere in a mini-documentary. I’ve always wanted to do that.

View the slide show

Over email, the pair told Salon about their inspiration for the project — and some of its most surprising revelations.

How did you two start working together, and how did the idea for this book emerge?

Maura Kelly: Jack and I got to know each other after I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Beast, pegged to the release of his previous book. We became friends, in part because we liked talking about the books we were loving, and the people we were loving — or trying to love. I was always asking Jack for advice about my dating conundrums. And a lot of times, when we’d be hanging out at his place, he’d start telling me how I should take a lesson from a novel. When I was dating a sourpuss academic, he reminded me of the cautionary tale of “Middlemarch,” for example. (In that book, the main character gets married to an arrogant guy who’s devoted his life to writing a scholarly work — and boy, is she miserable.) Eventually, I began to think, I should bottle Jack and begin selling him to all my friends. Then I thought, Hey, we should write a book!

Jack Murnighan: Ha ha. Yes, after many attempts to fit inside a bottle, I concluded that writing a book would be much easier.

In the introduction, Maura notes that while several of the great writers you discuss — specifically Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy — were sharp social observers, they had messy (or, in Austen’s case, uneventful) love lives themselves. How (if at all) should this color our interpretation of their characters’ romances?

MK: It’s a do as I say, not as I do kind of thing. Those authors weren’t saying, “Live as I live.” They were saying, “We are great amateur psychologists and great observers of life, and we have observed great lives — and failed, unhappy lives — and here’s what they look like.” Turns out, they didn’t look all that much like the lives of the authors!

JM: I can speak from experience that one learns a lot more from failure than from success. Maura and I are both pretty sanguine that our various checkered dating pasts helped give us a lot of the perspective that we share in the book.

What do you think readers might consider the most surprising example in the book?

JM: I was quite taken with Maura’s conclusion in the first chapter (based on Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”) that if you don’t find any guy good enough, it might actually be your problem. I also tend to get pretty surprised looks when I say that one can find the formula for how to be attractive to everyone in “War and Peace.” Not exactly most people’s idea of the go-to book for dating advice!

Of all the authors whose work you cover, whose romantic observations do you think are the most consistently true to life?

MK: My money might be on Tolstoy — in all those pages, he had the time (and, of course, the writerly skill) to create relationships that so much resemble the ones we encounter in the real world. But I feel a real emotional kinship with Dostoevsky and Dickens, I guess.

JM: I would agree with Maura’s list and also add both Gabriel García Márquez and D.H. Lawrence. I think they had extremely deep understandings of both psychology and human passion.

Do you think 21st-century readers who devour the classics run the risk of measuring themselves against unrealistic romantic examples — since in so many cases, ideals and realities were very different for men and women in past centuries? (E.g., will a female Austen-worshiper venture into the world of romance with unrealistic expectations of what she is likely to find?) Or do you think most of these books offer more abstract, timeless lessons?

MK: A big part of the reason why we did this book is because we found the love lessons in the great books so timeless. I write about Virgil’s “Aeneid,” and the relationship between Aeneas and Dido — which was basically a friendship with benefits, or at least Aeneas thought it was, whereas Dido was a lot more invested. Rereading her story as I was working on the book, I was reminded of how amazingly contemporary it felt. And even with Jane Austen — even with books written during an era when courtship was so much more formal — there’s a lot of philandering and a lot of wondering about where relationships are going that feels familiar. Maybe even more, with Austen, there are questions about finding the person who will help you become your true self, and your best self — about self-realization — which feel very relevant.

JM: Yeah, once you start talking about all-time classic books, they almost invariably have a level of depth and nuance that goes way beyond mere idealization. In fact, quite a few of the novels we cover dramatize the dangers of having rose-colored glasses on (“Great Expectations,” “The Magic Mountain,” “Remembrance of Things Past,” etc.), so I’d say great literature actually helps you keep from living only in dreams.

Roughly how many of the lessons you discuss represent genuine revelations you had while reading particular books — and how many represent the recognition of particular phenomena from your own life (or your friends’) in great novels?

MK: In my case, just about all of them, really! That was another big impetus for the book; so many of the novels that Jack and I love had stories that resembled the ones we were hearing about from our friends, or the stories we’ve personally lived. When we were working on the book, my editor called me to say she’d been counseling a friend through a breakup — and that she’d given the friend my chapter on “Revolutionary Road” because it was exactly what she needed to hear. It’s about how to deal when you’re dating a person who thinks he’s meant for much better things — but he’s never had the courage to see if he can achieve those things. So he marinates himself in a bitter juice of self-importance, protecting himself from the truth about his own insignificance by telling himself how much better he is than everyone around him. “Howards End” also really spoke to me personally — a book about what you should do if you’re dating someone whose political views you don’t agree with!

JM: Yeah, I confess to having sent draft chapters of mine and Maura’s to friends in the last few months just so I wouldn’t have to tell them the whole argument in person. And, as I express in a number of my chapters, I’m still trying to implement in my own life lessons from the books (like not over-idealizing at the beginning), so I’m thinking about the various books and scenes all the time.