The Secret Life of Groceries: a book review
On a whim I picked up Benjamin Lorr’s investigative journalism book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, and walked away with a newfound respect for the people who allow us the modern miracle (dark as it may be) of having almost unlimited food options in every grocery store in the western world. We forget that the grocery store as we know it is a fairly new invention, coming into being last century and used as propaganda to bolster support for capitalism. That food is as inexpensive and as abundant as it is, is indeed a miracle when considering the course of human history.
But oh, the price we pay for such convenience and abundance. Lorr doesn’t resort to preachiness, pointing an accusatory finger at greedy Americans. In fact, he willfully acknowledges all the benefits of today’s grocery stores, while highlighting many of the downsides of the grocery industry, particularly as it pertains to the challenging lifestyles of many of the people who devote their careers to meeting consumer demands. Lorr spends significant time with the people who make it all possible: the founder of Trader Joe’s (Joe Coulombe), a Whole Foods employee manning the seafood counter, a female long-haul trucker, an entrepreneur trying to get a new condiment onto grocery store shelves, a man who’s spent years on a shrimping boat. Lorr shines a light on the people we take for granted, and does so in a caring, meaningful way. Hearing directly from his subjects as they share stories about their often-difficult lives, I felt not only sympathy for them, but gratitude that they make my comfortable life possible.
Surprisingly, The Secret Life of Groceries isn’t a call to action in the obvious sense. Lorr doesn’t end the book with “five things American consumers should be doing to make the world a better place.” He actually does the opposite, offering little more than a shoulder shrug at our current plight, conceding that there is virtually nothing consumers can do in their purchasing habits to change the system. Rather, “any solution will have to come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done. At best, food is an opening, like any maw, that might lead us inside.”
What about buying organically certified foods? Or products produced from cage-free chickens? Or going vegan? Of this, Lorr writes that seals and certifications “promise us that moments of individual action can create a type of change that in reality only institutional forces like labor laws, unions, and trade deals can begin to approach. They allow us to purchase our ideals from others without ever having to enact them on our own.”
Perhaps not the message readers would like to hear, but also kind of refreshing. It’s not going to stop me from buying 100% recycled paper or using canvas bags, but I get it: my actions aren’t solving the problem; they’re making me feel good. Lorr concludes, “…we have got the food system we deserve. The adage is all wrong: it’s not that we are what we eat, it’s that we eat the way we are.”
If for no other reason than to get a better understanding of all that’s involved in the global industrial food complex, I highly recommend this book.