The Secret Life of Groceries
We eat what we are
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, by Benjamin Lorr
Let’s say you go to Whole Foods to pick up some sushi. According to The Secret Life of Groceries, getting you that sushi required a whole chain of human misery and exploitation:
First, a large portion of the seafood we eat is literally caught by slaves. Fishing boats in Southeast Asia are largely staffed by migrants who were tricked into thinking they were signing up for a well-paying job, but who find themselves on a boat with no means of escape (these boats almost never go to port, as they transfer their catch to other boats at sea). On these boats, they live off small amounts of food, do grueling work at risk of being maimed, and will be beaten by the captain if they don’t comply - all for no pay
Eventually, this fish makes its way to the US, where it or other ingredients will be delivered by trucking to the store. Trucking is a brutal job, requiring truckers to drive for hours at time for little financial reward. Many truckers make very little in the US after paying for fuel, repairs, and other fees. Annual turnover is 100%+, which means the average trucker lasts less than one year. New truckers are recruited through false promises and “free” training, leaving them with significant debt to pay off. One trucker he follows lives off pepsi given it’s the most cost-efficient and quick way to ingest calories
Even at Whole Foods, workers do not have full job security and are subject to “just-in-time” scheduling, which means their schedules are unpredictable and can change at the last minute. And even if there policies against it, a worker may be asked to do it to be a “team player” or suffer consequences. As Lorr points out, there are certain professions we expect to be “on call” (doctors, high-end lawyers), but they are compensated such. Retail isn’t.
There is a lot of nastiness and misery in the food industry. Importantly, we as consumers want to be avoided and insulated from this. “Organic” and “fair trade” certifications, in his opinion, are more about making us feel good than actually effecting change. There’s a broader point though - it’s often worth asking ourselves if we’re doing something to help the other person or simply to make ourselves feel better. As he puts it:
I begin to understand: third-party certification does not exist to solve a problem in the world, but to solve one inside of me. Their primary purpose is not to make the world a better place. It is to make the grocery store a safer place for me to shop. They lower my barriers to buy by promising me two things I crave: a sense of control and a sense of destiny. In reality, audits are faulty, easily gamed, expensive, cumbersome, and antithetical to creating trusting, mutualistic relationships. They are terrible at enforcement. Rather than connect me to others, audits align incentives in a closed loop: between manufacturers who pay a small fee to get graded on a soft curve, grocers who don’t have to worry about rising prices from true reform, and customers who get the same variety and convenience, plus a sense of virtue for only a few extra pennies. We all win. Except those outside the circle
A couple other thoughts:
What makes the food industry so brutal, I’d guess, are a few things. First is the fact that much of food production (especially meat) is violent and messy work (which we pay for people to hide from us). You’re working with living things that bleed, ooze, and smell bad. As much as we can try to control nature - the average apple we eat was picked over a year ago - there’s only so much we can do. The work itself also often pits large buyers against small suppliers, which often results in asymmetric power dynamics. Grocery store buyers wield tremendous power over new food brands and use “pay to play” schemes as a way of getting free money (i.e., food company has to pay money to be sold)
At the same time, though, you could probably do some version of this for every industry. Technology? There are reports of iPhones being made with forced labor. Social networks employ thousands of content moderators who are exposed to traumatic images and content every single day.
There’s a great (and lighter) chapter on Trader Joe’s and how it’s succeeded at branding itself as a unique grocery store, one for people who maybe want a more “interesting” shopping experience. And it’s true! I will sometimes find trader Joe’s cookies in my house, and think “OK, these look good, let me try not eating them.” But when we accidentally ordered Chips Ahoy from Instacart, my reaction was “who bought this junk food?” even though it was calorically equivalent to the other stuff. A few other notes:
Trader Joe’s packaging uses lots of victorian images / pictures as they are old enough to use for free
Trader Joe’s is very focused on $ / sq foot, which is why it’s hard to buy toilet paper and paper towels there
I enjoyed it overall and would recommend it, with the caveat that it was darker than I expected.
One challenging (and refreshing) part about the book is that it doesn’t offer much in the way of prescriptive solutions, preferring to focus on how the systems we’ve created make it incredibly difficult to change things (i.e., supply chains for seafood is so complex that even NGOs focused on it might admit they don’t fully understand it). You can try to shop at more “ethical” stores, but Lorr would say that the extra money you’re spending is simply being captured by the certification company or retailer. And it’s not like “fair trade coffee” is transported by special truckers who are paid a living wage and given health insurance.
I don’t have a view on whether or not there are good solutions, but do think there is a point in that many of the “organic” or “ethically sourced” retailers talk a big game about what they’re doing while still participating in a system with meaningful exploitation (of workers, suppliers, and other value chain participants like truckers).
I’ll close with Lorr arguing that this is the food system we deserve:
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. The result is both incredible beyond words—abundance, wish fulfillment, and low price—and as cruel and demeaning as Tun-Lin [who was enslaved on a fishing boat] voluntarily choosing to return to those boats.