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

by Benjamin Lorr

Qualities like ethics and aesthetics get swallowed by the market, and reduced to price.

Lynne estimates she grossed $200,000 last year—that is a rough calculation based on miles driven—but that she took home less than $17,000. This for a fourteen-year veteran trucker who knows her industry inside and out.

is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation.

I watch them as they patrol the room in clusters wielding this power, rugby shirt after rugby shirt stuffed into slacks and cinched up with a tan belt. These men typically have hair that blurs the line between crew cuts and balding, and walk with multiple electronic devices clipped to their waists, a collective style that basically serves to broadcast I’d rather be riding my mower and/or cracking jokes about murdering the guy trying to date my daughter to that guy’s face.

leave the Fancy Food Show into daylight, strapped down by tote bags filled with other tote bags, taste buds burnt, dopamine depleted, slightly bloated, and swearing off everything but plain white rice and non-Greek yogurt for the rest of the week.

I am alternately awed and troubled and always have to refrain from taking advantage.

What does it mean to have and display a consumer attitude? It means first perceiving life as a series of problems, which can be specified, more or less defined, singled out, dealt with . . . It means secondly believing that dealing with such problems, solving them, is one’s duty . . . It means, thirdly, that for every problem, already known, or as may still arise in the future, there is a solution—a special object or recipe, prepared by specialists, by people with superior know-how, and one’s task is to find it . . . —Zygmunt Bauman, 1990