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

by Benjamin Lorr

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...