I'm a sucker for books that explain the societal forces shaping unexamined aspects of our daily lives. The Secret Life of Groceries looks at various parts of the supply chain that enables "the dark miracle of the American supermarket."
The words "secret" and "dark" imply that the book might be an investigative exposé about the abuses required to ensure that Americans have cheap roasted chicken. Lorr acknowledges uncomfortable truths about food safety and the exploitation of workers, but he is more interested in the day-to-day reality of laborers involved –– truckers, buyers, food marketers, retail clerks –– and the reasons their jobs take the form that they do. The answer is almost always the modern tyranny of logistics and human capital management.
In the best parts of the book, Lorr does a passable imitation of David Foster Wallace's style and approach. He embeds himself with a worker, describes their life in an immersive and slightly ironic way, and explains how the details fit with broad underlying themes about the human condition, conveyed with complex sentence structures and discursive footnotes. I appreciated many of his conceptual insights, such as how the nature of the product changes as it moves through the system:
In the same way the fecal shrieking bird ceases ceases being an animal and becomes food, an item within the grocery matrix loses its identity as food and becomes a product. ... Now it is defined by the cubic inches of its packaging, its price per unit...
Far from being a muckraker, Lorr wants to present a balanced view of the conflicting motivations in the system.
When he rides along with a long-haul trucker, he shows how tiring and dangerous the job is and how the economic setup makes it nearly impossible for her to succeed, but he doesn't demonize the trucking companies and notes that the truckers themselves value their freedom.
It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation... "This job is a misery, but it's the only thing in the world for me."
What people call the supply chain is a long, interconnected network of human beings working on other humans' behalf. ... The result is both incredible beyond words ––abundance, wish fulfillment, and low price––and as cruel and demeaning as [work slavery]. To me, this is as hopeful as it is depressing.
The most intriguing sections to me were those about crafting a retail identity that helps the consumer (i.e. me) find meaning in consumption. The first chapter is about Trader Joes, and the penultimate chapter is about a retail consultant who helps stores find "bliss points" for themselves and their customers.
The tone and thoughtfulness fade the farther Lorr gets from the American consumer experience. The final chapter travels to Thailand to see shrimp aquaculture at "the bottom of the commodity chain." Lorr makes good observations about the impact of treating something as a commodity, but there's no balance to be found in a situation involving slavery, overfishing, and shrimp eyeball ablation. It felt like a chapter he had to include, but it retrospectively cast a pall over the rest of the book.
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