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

by Benjamin Lorr

His voice is about three octaves deeper than his thin frame has any reason to suggest. The effect is grandfatherly to the extreme. He uses phrases like “every simple bastard” and “a bunch of kooks” and laughs at his own jokes in a bona fide chuckle, which is to say, with an easy, self-amused, reflective roll, as if he’s astonished by a world so weird as to provide him this type of fodder. His eyes widen frequently but not theatrically. He leans in; he listens. He points out accepted industry-wide lies, calls his friends and competitors out on casual racism and sexism, and checks his own exaggerations immediately. He is the quintessential non–bullshit artist. And it is an art, this straight talk to the extreme. It is active and participatory and evoked from you, often despite you.

“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.”

travel was another form of education.

Continuity is in the eye of the beholder. Commodity is a matter of perception. Coffee can be Folgers or it can be terroir: the regions where beans are grown span continents and microclimates, lumping them together under a single label is as silly as lumping together Ethiopia and Brazil, or jungle and mountains. To anyone who bothered to look, the idea of a unified commodity coffee called Folgers was an invention based on simplifying trade.

Trucking as an industry is gargantuan: 10.7 billion tons of freight per year get moved around this great land on trucks, which breaks down to 54 million tons a day, or 350 pounds per man, woman, and child. Per day. It is the most common form of employment in the majority of American states, with more than 12.6 million commercial drivers circulating our highways.

It turns out, however, that in trucking, along with the tire tread, brake pad, and transmission, the trucker himself is another one of those parts structurally designed to be worn to failure.

The truth for perishable grocery is closer to an NICU ward at the hospital: blazing technology furiously working to sustain premature life. The fruit and veg of our lives are alive and need to stay that way until we bite into them. Unlike the NICU, however, the distribution center has no interest in survivability per se. Instead all this technology serves to control. The teenage ambition to stop-start time, pause, and then unfreeze life at the perfect moment is steadily being achieved for many forms of produce.