The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

by Benjamin Lorr

Night workers, a motley rainbow of low English, low skill, low smile workers, come in, kneepads over long pants, to restock the shelves like a reverse midnight harvest.

Those were some strong sniffs. And yet none of it—not the trash fish nor fecal lagoons—was as fundamentally gross and disturbing as the smell that came out of that fish case in Manhattan. In a Whole Foods. In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the wealthiest nation in the world. Which is to say, melodrama has its place in life, but not in my descriptions of smells.

In 2018, Americans spent $701 billion at supermarket-style grocery stores, still our largest food expenditure by a wide margin; there are 38,000 of these stores across this land, and the average adult will spend 2 percent of their life inside one. They are the point of interface most familiar and least understood in our food system: bland to the point of invisibility, so routine they blur into background.

We’ve been happy to let more impersonal aspects of our food system—from industrialized slaughterhouses to farm bill subsidies—take up the lion’s share of investigation and critique. But to understand how and why our food gets to us in the form it does, the grocery store is a powerful entry point.

And their operation is something to behold. Grocery stores—and the supply chain that has grown up around them—are shockingly efficient. We spend only 10 percent of our budget on food, compared to 40 percent by our great-grandparents in 1900, and 30 percent by our grandparents in the 1950s.

In the early republic, around the War of 1812, nearly 90 percent of the population worked to produce the nation’s food; it was a grueling physical life, and in addition to being costly, the food produced was of uneven quality, in tightly limited supply, and could and did kill through disease. Now less than 3 percent of our population produces enough food to feed us all.

the fact is we spend less money than almost every other country in the world on food and we spend less time gathering that food than at any time in history.

So, within a century, we have cut rates of hunger and nutritional deficiency to historic lows, reduced food-borne illness to a rounding error, and democratized food that was once the height of luxury into fare for everyday consumption. And we have been so successful in all those endeavors that we now grapple with a series of problems entirely unprecedented in the history of humanity: of too much food, of using food to distribute ethical responsibility, of food as a proxy for control in our own increasingly detached lives.

The memory is crystalline in a way that feels false; a characteristic known as “flashbulb” memory, which I’ve since learned is associated with trauma.

on the other side of this tunnel the chicken emerges into a new room, now a decapitated, drained thing, all white pocked skin, a whizzing gleaming globe of meat racing forward on the line. There is a phase shift. The floors are now bloodless, men and women in white smocks stand at green plastic counters, and the whole area radiates with the high, reassuring notes of chlorine. “That is the precise point they go from living thing to food. You watch it happen,”

A very similar process occurs in the retail store. Those deboned bulk chilled chicken breasts—or Granny Smith apples, or long fillets of frozen salmon, or whatever other food you want to imagine—arrive to the stores in their cardboard boxes, vacu-sealed in a marvel of plastic packaging, and when you click your box cutter down and reach to take them out, they cease being food. Another transformation has occurred; they are product now. Merchandise. SKUs.

Detailing these pivot points isn’t just a weird exercise in categorization or linguistics. These shifts have material effects. As a culture we do a generally excellent to overzealous job thinking about food, a highly conflicted job thinking about its origins in the natural world as a living thing, and spend almost no time thinking about our groceries as retail product.

The maw to me, like the sun above interfacing with the chloroplasts below the leaf, is more than just a mouth: it is a secular revelation, a complex of destruction and creativity, anchored in need. It is the sensory cells of the gut. The neuronal charge to acquire. The curiosities, comforts, and cravings we convince ourselves are necessities.

each of our unique pie holes mere tributaries to some more tremendous vortex right at the heart of the human project.

ultimately it should upend our perception of grocery to remember it isn’t about food, it never has been about food—food is the business of eating—grocery, we’ll see, that’s completely different; it’s the business of desire.