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

by Benjamin Lorr

These days, it’s not enough to simply produce fruit; one must obtain fruit that is beautiful . . . good taste is not necessary—just beauty, gloss, and size. They are really more intended to dazzle the eye than to satisfy the palate. —Gustave Rivière, writing in 1894

In particular, Saunders is inspired by a new type of novelty restaurant called the “cafeteria.” If we want to think about the introduction of the supermarket as a birth, the cafeteria was foreplay. During the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, John Kruger builds a temporary American “smorgasbord” restaurant where patrons can peruse a series of different options. In 1898, Childs Restaurant in New York riffs on this structure, giving each customer a tray and asking them to walk single file down a line selecting their food from various steaming pans. The result is a sensation that sweeps across the country. Career male waiters in their starched white uniforms are out, their job now easily done by just one or two perky young women.

After reading this paragraph i thought "I bet the author is a man". It is.

Every few minutes there is a crackle over the loudspeaker, “Attention professional driver number 153, shower number 7 is now available.” It breaks over the Christian rock with a sad functionality similar to the way dancers are called up to the stage at a strip club.

This author is so sleazy. So many analogies like this.

The big lie here is that the warehouse is just a location for passive storage, where items are slotted in, sit around, and then get retrieved as needed. 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. At the various distribution centers I visit, I walk into sauna-sized rooms full of butter-yellow bananas, ceiling to floor, jammed with a network of probes and wires. A few doors down, I’ll find wall-to-wall racks of rock-hard avocados or red unripe tomatoes, tomatoes so firm they fall to the floor and bounce with the thud of a baseball. All of which can be kept in suspension or fast-forwarded toward a ripe, salable version depending on need. That fresh apple you bite into has typically been sitting in dormancy for close to a year. Red cherries, that epitome of summer freshness, might have been stuck stabilized for two and half months. Bananas, avocados, tomatoes, and limes land somewhere in between. There are exceptions. Even in perfect conditions, most leafy greens deteriorate in just under three weeks, but even t...

He simply demands a payment from the young entrepreneurs who come to his office in exchange for putting their items on his shelf. The entrepreneurs are desperate. They are probably already leveraged, and so what is a little more debt to them? They also have no hope of a return if their item is not on a shelf. And if every buyer in the industry begins to do the same thing, they really have no choice. “It’s crack,” Errol Schweizer, the former head of grocery for Whole Foods, tells me. “Every buyer is addicted. You charge a fee and it gets added to the budget. Every year, you are expected to bring in more. This is serious money. It can bail you out if you are in a mess. Often there is no return for the supplier. It is essentially extractive.” The euphemism is “trade spend” and it is an area of the industry nobody wants to talk about too loudly because it is so murky and backward. The idea that the best products are on the shelf—rather than, say, the producers who ponied up the biggest bucks—benefits the supplier and the store. And what the customer doesn’t know can’t hurt them.

aside: over the thirty-five days it takes to grow a chicken to maturity, the floor of the shed will rise six inches in height simply from the accumulated chicken shit the birds produce, and this chicken shit gives off ammonia gas so strong that the “live catch” handlers who go in to gather the chickens for slaughter have to apply cornstarch to their skin to prevent the ammonia from peeling the flesh off their bodies.)

And here grocery has one last trick: it allows us to hate our shrimp and eat it too. The image of the bad polluting aquaculture farmer or vulnerable exploited migrant gets imprinted in our first-world brain, while the fungibility of commodity goods—that maze of brokers and agents—gives the entire system the plausible deniability it craves. We might demand action about horrid conditions, but the idea of asking us to forgo shrimp, even momentarily, and fill our nonstick woks with some other protein is precisely the type of inconvenience the entire system is built to protect against. And the store is left alone to figure out a solution.

The moral fantasy is to raise prices. Perhaps a sign posted at the seafood counter saying, “Due to labor abuse in Thailand, the price of our shrimp is increasing as we work to ensure every person in our supply chain receives a fair wage.” And then the store raises prices, sells the same amount of fish in defiance of the laws of supply and demand, and dutifully passes the increased revenue back up the chain in reverse, to its importer, who passes it on to a manufacturer, who passes it on to a compromised supplier—one who has decided to turn a new leaf. Then the money is actually used by that supplier: reforming their recruitment process, expanding their human resources department, educating their workers on their rights, providing pathways to grieve abuse, and finally—if there is any money left over—increasing wages. But even if all goes right, the money arrives intact, nobody in between gives themselves a raise, that last bit of work done by the supplier is incredibly hard. It will generate exactly zero press since it is also searingly boring. And it is completely and utterly beyond the expertise of a grocery chain. There are NGOs devoted to this kind of work who openly admit they barely understand the complexities of how to reform a supply chain.

We hit the unpaved roads, jostling over ruts, the driver blasting crap Thai pop music that all the interns seem to know by heart and thus mouth silently and sleepily as we roll.

Author is such an asshole.