Benjamin Lorr > Quotes

“I had watched organics and fair trade explode into billion-dollar industries. But it was hard to say the world was becoming a better place for the marginal spending. In fact, it felt like it was becoming a more insulated one. I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. 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.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“What appears to be happening is that the industry has figured out not only how to make humans replaceable but also how to make money off their replacement. The labor shortage is profitable.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“The real object of our scorn might not be in our food safety standards, in the revolving-door regulators, in the rise of industry, or even in the abuse and commodification of men, but in ourselves as agents in this world: for knowing what we want and what we are willing to give up to get it, for understanding that this is a moral outrage we’ve been digging for all along because it verifies what we know but also don’t quite want to acknowledge about ourselves.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“in 1890, Robert Gair of Brooklyn begins to manufacture precut, easy-to-fold boxes. The effect on the grocery store cannot be overstated: regular shipments of products suddenly make economic sense. Producer and retailer become connected in a far more consistent manner.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“By 1900, the shift is momentous: packaged food is responsible for one-fifth of all manufacturing in the United States. Modern life does not exist without this shift.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Too often during these media storms, I’ve heard people say, let’s boycott this product,” Simon Baker, a migrant researcher, explains. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground. In my research, I’ve found this often means going into sex work . . . What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“All these individually wrapped products beget something even more precious to us. Choice. As synonym for control. In a world without boxes lit with insignias, colors, and slogans, there is little need for a consumer to touch anything. It’s all the same. But suddenly, with cardboard boxes flying off the factory line, the greedy tentacles of customer demand are excited; they head to the general store and request particular products.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Bikram Yoga

“Commodity is contempt all the way down, and wandering the ALDI distribution center I realize just how much materialism depends on individuality, on our ability to inject meaning into things.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“If anything, this is a conspiracy of good intentions, convincing ourselves in circles that we are doing just enough not to require any uncomfortable action, replacing the terror of a gargantuan world with a feeling of control.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“The postures are both a metaphor and a means for that process. They are tools for creating a connection between the imagination and the physical world. Realizing this connection—this union between body and mind—could be called yoga.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“Along the way, there were minor tweaks. Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma City grocer, introduced the shopping cart in 1937.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Treat people as if they are what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they can be.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“Something that makes us feel we should be oppressing someone to make it all make sense. And, of course, that something is real. Actually there are many somethings.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“A process that continues every day for the two months that I work there.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Air travel was uncomfortable, arduous, and for the elite. And then, in a blink, it wasn’t.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Better educated, not more intelligent,” Joe grunts. “They weren’t any smarter, but college gave them a different vocabulary.” And he decided he was going to give them a chance to flex it while they shopped.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation. The most satisfied truckers I meet are the ones who have explicitly recognized and chosen that trade-off.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization. It is lunacy.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“It also had the benefit of being extremely cheap. Discarded marine artifacts were in abundant supply and Joe could go down to the salvage yards near the harbor and pick up the flotsam for pennies per pound. And so the first store was “a riot of marine artifacts including a ship’s bell, oars, netting, and half a row boat.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“So it is with wariness that I bring up the cliché about business being a creative act. But, hey, that’s what Joe made me see.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“he becomes obsessed with products that have a high value relative to size. “Joe would measure every product with a ruler and calculate price per cubic inch,”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“But the biggest thing Joe discovered as he peered into the supply chains of health foods was that he had been right. Almost every product in the grocery store could be sold like wine. Continuity is in the eye of the beholder. Commodity is a matter of perception.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Lawrence is wrong and Andy is out. Whole Foods has let him go. They are working on a new, more efficient way of training employees, and his position has been “restructured.” And so the single most enthusiastic person, the truest true believer I met in my time in retail, the guy whose answer to everything was just work harder and trust that things will work out, has found out exactly whom to trust, exactly how hard things can work out.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“This was not media hype. Pope Pius XII himself weighed in, announcing his blessing from the Holy See. A few year later, when Khrushchev toured Washington, D.C., in 1959, the supermarket brought a temporary détente to the Cold War. As the Soviet premier scanned the store, he erupted with spontaneous praise: “I want to greet the manager of this supermarket. I am truly filled with admiration over what I see.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“In 1932, only 2 percent of the people qualified to go to college actually went. In 1964 that number had jumped to 60 percent,” he tells me. This was change. The extreme growth in college enrollment was largely the work of the G.I. Bill of Rights, guaranteeing returning veterans—first from the Second World War, then Korea—a college education. And Joe realized the reason he kept coming back to the article was the wave hadn’t crested. The war in Vietnam meant the G.I. Bill was about to hit a third generation. “All these college graduates,” he says. “I just thought they might want something different to eat.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“The next day we return and do it all again. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow except to say, by hour 5.5 on day 2, I look up to see we are at slide 27 of 145 of the PowerPoint and I want to cry.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Yoga is simply one of those things impervious to certainty, as incapable of corruption as it is of authenticity. And no amount of bossy, possessive attempts to claim a “real yoga” will make it otherwise.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga