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

by Benjamin Lorr

Ian Kelleher, co-founder of Peeled Snacks, noticed the same thing from the outside. “One by one, I started seeing all the good, smart people leaving . . . Whole Foods was the leader in progressive activism in the food industry. Then somewhere by mid-2016, everyone I knew doing that type of work got sacked.”

And so at the same time Ian was noticing the best and most idealistic people leaving from the outside, Errol watched from the inside as they were replaced by a new type of hire. These were people from Home Depot, Walmart, and Target. “They have talents,” Errol tells me. “They do certain things really well.

And in it, I found a whole community based on this ethos; people reveling in the very real ways they had transformed from couch potatoes and addicts, remarking after every class about just how much more capable they felt now. But what was the end? What did you do once you became a better version of yourself? Where did all this self-improvement lead? The answer was always back to more yoga.

This is to say, 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 voluntarily choosing to return to those boats.

I very much don’t want to dissuade you so much as I want you to consider that any solution will come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done.