The Secret Life of Groceries

Kombucha, pre-packaged coffee drinks, and lots of other beverages

Woodland Market, downtown San Francisco

Photo by me

I read the NY Times review of Benjamin Lorr's The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket a few weeks ago and immediately reserved it at the public library. Now I wish I'd bought a copy, just so I could lend it out. I'll be trying to force it on people, left and right.

Yes, it's about American grocery stories, with an initial focus on Joe Coulombe and Trader Joe's, because TJ's, during its earlier years, worked contrary to every other grocery store. After it was purchased by the German ALDI grocery corporation, not so much, although it does still seem to treat its employees more like people, less like replaceable cogs in a machine. The author contrasts TJ's with Whole Foods, which - guess what? - has changed, and not for the better, since being acquired by Amazon.

You get a pocket history of how the grocery store came to be. It's a very American institution - on my first trip to France, in 1979, Parisians were still shopping in small, specialized neighborhood stores.

Lorr gets into how products get to the shelves via several special areas: the truck drivers who move products around the country, a condiment called Slawsa, made up of cabbage and salsa, which has quite a history, and shrimp. The story of Slawsa tells you a lot about how very difficult it is to take a product from a family kitchen to a grocery's shelves, and why, and what happens to that family recipe when it's produced in large quantities.

The trucking story is fascinating and mostly extremely sad. If you already hate deregulation, well, this will give you a chance to hate St. Jimmy Carter, whose administration deregulated trucking. Truckers have truly terrible lives and are more or less married to their trucks.

Lastly, by the time you're done with this book, you'll be seriously wondering whether you should stop shopping in grocery stores altogether. The shrimp story is completely appalling and not at all a secret, though Lorr manages to get very close to the Thai shrimp fishing industry. Basically, what you learn is that there is so much unethical and downright criminal behavior in the production of food that unless you're buying directly from the producers, you have absolutely no idea how it got from production to your refrigerator. If you're buying your fruits and vegetables from farmers markets or community supported agriculture, and your dairy and meat, poulty, or fish very locally, you might be okay.

But this isn't the case in the most of the US. If you're inland, you might or might not have access to freshly caught fish. (I live a few miles from the Pacific.) If you're in Maine, you don't have the year-round growing season we have in California (I have a lemon tree in my yard!), and the citizens of Maine should be able to get oranges in February. Locally grown and processed chicken and beef is expensive and simply out of reach of most people, though in my little Northern California bubble, yes, I can buy these things. Dairy products from Clover or Alexander or Straus; meat from Marin Sun Farms; wild-caught local fish from various sources; vegetables from Full Belly Farm and other small farms; bread from La Farine (though I don't know how they source their flour, etc.) You could try growing your own, though I think subsistence farming is complicated and difficult. How do you feel about raising and killing pigs, chickens, and lamb, if you eat meat and poultry?

I zipped through The Secret Life of Groceries as quickly as I did for several reasons: it's a great story, the book is short, and Benjamin Lorr is a terrific writer. He's eloquent, personally involved, can turn a phrase beautifully, is sometimes very, very funny, and almost always wryly witty. I don't have a huge interest in yoga (Pilates is more my style), but his book on Bikram yoga sounds fascinating, so....it's on my list.