Book Review: The Secret Life of Groceries

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

This is a very well researched non-fiction book about the grocery industry. Lorr breaks the chapters up into sections touching on nearly every aspect of the grocery industry, from supply to shipping and niche marketing. There’s a chapter about what it’s like to be a trucker, how 7-11 got started from an ice distribution store, about the Joe of Trader Joe’s, about Whole Foods and about the seamy underbelly of commercial shrimp farming.

Unlike, say, Michael Pollen’s books, Lorr doesn’t really leave you with a “change your life” kind of takeaway. This book is mostly just about educating you on things you probably didn’t know much about. For example, I didn’t realize what a huge human and environmental cost aquaculture had. I didn’t know that those guys hawking salsa at the farmer’s market were entrepreneurs in an industry with an 89% failure rate. I also didn’t realize that the weakening of teamster’s unions, while reducing prices for consumers, turned trucking into something close to indentured servitude.

I think the story about the enslaved shrimp fisher was the hardest to listen to, and the most memorable, but the story of the poor trucker and how shabbily they are treated was second. Hearing about Whole Foods’ values being weakened after they were purchased by Amazon had me nodding. Without meaning to, perhaps, this book turns into a diatribe against capitalism that left me conflicted. I love that I can get strawberries out of season and that a bag of frozen shrimp costs less than $10 and that there’s a chain of sandwich shops trying to give me the same peaceful beauty as a Belgian farmhouse. But it also sucks that there’s so much suffering in the world.



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