All the bad things about the food supply in one book

The tomatoes you see in the photo exceptional: they were entirely raised without anyone in the entire supply chain being mistreated or underpaid— among the only such food we’ve eaten lately. As you can probably guess that's because they are homegrown tomatoes. Specifically, they were planted and cultivated by our nephew Jason and his partner Katrina in their own backyard, gathered by our own hands, and delivered to our home in our own vehicle. For each not-homegrown bite of food we've eaten recently, it's possible that someone suffered in some way when it was being planted and picked, fished, raised and slaughtered, packaged, processed, transported, wholesaled, or retailed!

Why am I thinking about abused, misused, overworked, and underpaid workers in the food industry? I’ve been reading The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr.

Lorr’s book covers the “life” of groceries from several perspectives. Of course there’s the perspective we shoppers all see at supermarkets. Lorr concentrates mainly on the early history of Trader Joe’s in the 1970s and on working conditions at Whole Foods before amazon.com acquired them in 2017, but there's lots of material about how supermarkets select, purchase, stock, procure, and negotiate over the thousands of products on their shelves.

Predictably, there’s a chapter on the sad life of battery-raised chickens. And more...

There’s the perspective of a trucker who delivers groceries to warehouses for establishments like Aldi’s, with whom Lorr traveled for a while in around 2014. We learn of the extreme desperation of truck drivers now, and how the profession lost its middle class wages and status when the industry was de-unionized and de-regulated during the Regan administration. Like all good journalists, Lorr presents the very personal and how it applies in general. Here, it's the plight of one woman trying to make a living driving a big rig, and how her life is typical of the overall conditions that leave so many optimistic and ambitious individuals bankrupt and demolished. Not to mention that truckers have “one of the most dangerous jobs, right up there with deep-sea fishermen and timber cutters, boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job.” (p. 84)

There’s the perspective of a victim of human trafficking who was forced to work on a grotesquely exploitative fishing boat off Thailand. His story is heart-breaking, and also illustrates the plight of vast numbers of individuals forced to work in the shrimp and fishing industry. This individual’s life became a bit happier in the end, but the entire picture is grim, including not only the slave labor issue, but also issues of environmental damage and unsanitary production conditions. In this context Lorr also presents the efforts of several NGOs trying to alleviate the plight of human rights abuses in these industries.

There is also the perspective of the innovator who wants to create a new product for the food market: for this he follows Julie Busha, the entrepreneur who developed a product called Slawsa — a condiment combining slaw and salsa. Like the history of Trader Joe’s, this story describes business conditions and the practices of grocery store buyers, including the practice of accepting bribes for product placement (under a slightly different name) and lots of other things you’d rather not know.

Several themes recur throughout The Secret Life of Groceries. Above all, we learn about the plight of workers, including Whole Foods employees, slave labor in Southeast Asia, big rig drivers, and more. 

Lorr is also very interested in the relationship of consumers to the food they purchase, and why they are swayed by a number of motives to be kind to animals, to sympathize with workers, to figure out which foods are healthy and virtuous, to avoid pesticides and dangerous food additives, and so on. There is a lot of philosophical stuff:

“In many ways we are living in the age of specialty. The entire category gesturing toward an authenticity the rest of the food system left behind. The fact that the authenticity itself is so splintered, contradictory, and chaotic is almost incidental to our craving for it. It is personal: one man’s specialty is another man’s scorn.“ (p. 114)

Another recurring theme is the question of guarantees made by organizations to certify that a product is organic or fair trade or non-GMO or one of many other desired attributes that reflect morality or food fetishes of one sort or another. He more or less debunks the quality and concept of these claimed virtues, and the hopeless task of inspecting unwilling or uncooperative industrial food production facilities. Lorr writes:

“The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.” (p. 189)

Lorr's summary of his book:

"The great lesson of my time with groceries is that 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. Retail grocery is a reflection. What people call the supply chain is a long, interconnected network of human beings working on other humans’ behalf. It responds to our actions, not our pieties; and in its current form it demands convenience and efficiency starting from the checkout counter on down." (p. 269). 

This is a readable and quite interesting book, though a bit scattered in its approach to such a protean topic. It's well worth reading, and offers very interesting detailed studies of the few individuals that are covered. The publication date is this month (September, 2020), but I find it mysterious that most of his research was done several years ago, and there is little truly current material.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander.