The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

 

Summary (from the publisher): The American supermarket is an everyday miracle. But what does it take to run one? What are the inner workings of product delivery and distribution? Who sets the price? And who suffers for the convenience and efficiency we've come to expect? In this rollicking exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and compulsively readable prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn:

• The secrets of Trader Joe’s success from Trader Joe himself
• Why truckers call their job “sharecropping on wheels”
• What it takes for a product to earn certification labels like “organic” and “fair trade”
• The struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business
• The truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry

The result is a page-turning portrait of an industry in flux, filled with the passion, ingenuity, and inequity required to make this piece of the American dream run. The product of five years of research and hundreds of interviews across every level of the industry, The Secret Life of Groceries is essential reading for those who want to understand our food system -- delivering powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest for more and compassionate insight into the lives that provide it.

Review: Author Benjamin Lorr investigated the dark side of the grocery store world in this work of immersive reporting. In its pages, he provides some history behind major grocery store chains like Trader Joe's, an overview of the trucking industry that makes grocery stores possible, the cutthroat world of entrepreneurs seeking to get new food products on the shelf, and the alarming slave trade behind the seafood industry. Lorr spent time on the ground in immersive reporting, talking directly to those who have experienced the different elements of the grocery store industry. This is a powerful and insightful social commentary on the American food system.

America expects cheap, easily accessible groceries. But the behind the scenes cost to stock the shelves is often a human one. In researching for this book, Lorr saw and heard about terrible scenes. Pigs covered in sores, fish smashed into jelly, people trying to make an honest living trucking but instead locked into a terrible cycle of debt and grueling work. It was wild to read about people aspiring to get their product in stores spending their live savings promoting their product and learning about the tiny percentage that actually succeed. I was particularly horrified by the human trafficking stories in the Thailand seafood industry that Lorr detailed. The gruesome forced labor, abuse, and murder of men who are taken against their will to work on ships was difficult to read, particularly when learning that the United States purchases a heavy percentage of seafood from Thailand. 

The subjects focused on in this book don't even begin to cover many avenues of the national grocery store industry. The subject matter is just too vast for one text and one person researching. For instance, the book didn't even begin to touch on farming or any of the crop industries that make up much of the groceries stocked in stores. Furthermore, each of the chapters covered could have likely been a standalone book. At times, I wondered if each should have been its own book. In some ways the book didn't seem particularly cohesive, as the subject jumped wildly from chapter to chapter. The book also didn't spend too much time in the actual grocery store, but more in the back channels of the industry producing the food that ultimately ends up in the grocery stores. But I learned a lot about careers within the food industry that I had no knowledge of before. This was an extensively researched book that certainly makes the reader thing before blindly grabbing food of the shelves of the store. 

Stars: 4