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

by Benjamin Lorr

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. Who participates on trucking blogs, mentors younger truckers about the snares and scams. Who lives in her truck and stays out on the road three weeks at a time. Who works more than seventy hours the week I am with her, much of it spent in a state of a constant vigilance, where she sleeps in four to five hour bursts, and wakes up for three thirty a.m. appointments that are make-or-break for her career, but ignored by the distribution center on the other side. Who didn’t see her mother for two years because she didn’t have the time off and couldn’t get loads that lined up with her mother’s location. The $17,000 also—based on my experience with her—is a number likely inflated by pride. The week I’m with her, Lynne receives a weekly paycheck for just $100. Which is what she received the week before. And the week before that. “It’s in my contract,” she tells me. “No matter how many expenses I have, I always have the right to a check for one hundred dollars. So that is what I usually get . . . I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing how to stretch it.”

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. I think everyone involved agrees that this isn’t quite ideal, that in a perfect world, the problem of the human driver would be tidied up and eliminated by drone, automation, or some other insentient mute machine. But in the meantime, the long meantime, the customer and the lowest price prevail, the belt smokes, and the ingenious ways to render a man or woman disposable continue.

It’s hard to explain just how vulnerable you are as a trucker. It reorients my understanding of the bravado in the profession. You are beholden to the carrier. They control your wages. They own your home and source of livelihood in fact, if not in “owner-operator” name. They determine when you get to see your family and when you get the opportunity to work. You are beholden to the economy as a whole in a way that is far more intimate than for most of us. You are locked in a culture that venerates self-reliance and individual persistence and is hostile to displays of weakness or need: a profession where being tossed off a truck is a common and noncontroversial practice: where death and life-threatening accidents are never far from the mind. You are also inherently isolated, lonely, and physically vulnerable by the very nature of the job.

The volume of cruelty in any factory farm is so majestic that it echoes the larger human place in the world. You can be deafened by the noise of it, or close your ears completely.

“You’re writing about an American tragedy. But it’s not the tragedy you think. It’s a tragedy of imagination. We have a generation of guys that can only imagine being Walmart.”

And his central idea was that we use material possessions to provide a bridge back to them. Once I start looking, I see this everywhere: my city slicker aunt’s collection of cowboy boots; a wealthy friend’s pride in his $1.99 tube socks; my winter jacket designed for a Himalayan ascent, yet destined for snowy walks in Brooklyn. But perhaps nowhere do I see it more than in the grocery store. In the supplement aisle, of course—all those herbal, Ayurvedic, or neurotropic signifiers we grab at and swallow—but also in the food itself. The entire Michael Pollan ethos is, after all, a way of making food a bridge to the past when the world was simple and purer.

What I craved was a reassurance that the glut of pleasure and variety—from the ninety-nine-cent bag of chips to the heaps of grass-fed ground lamb—weren’t an unfair bounty but an opportunity. That my passivity could actually be flipped into a chance to take action, validate myself; that despite all my taking, I could give back. Which is, of course, precisely what those ethical, organic, and fair labor seals are offering. Talking to Kevin about bliss points, I begin to understand: third-party certification does not exist to solve a problem in the world, but to solve one inside of me. Their primary purpose is not to make the world a better place. It is to make the grocery store a safer place for me to shop. They lower my barriers to buy by promising me two things I crave: a sense of control and a sense of destiny.

Like all displaced ideals, kept at a distance in order to be preserved. It’s easy to talk about the tricks and traps of market capitalism, the way we are being manipulated, but I needed Kevin to show me how much any manipulation begins at home.

Fishers like Tun-Lin never see these small, unsalable fish make it to port. They are passed to a sister boat at a rendezvous, traded along with food, cigarettes, Thai baht, and fuel. This is called transshipment at sea. It saves fuel for the larger refrigerated fishing vessels, and it allows some boats to stay out almost indefinitely. Resupplied by others, they turn into floating prisons for trafficked workers.

“We always said if you are trying to be the cheapest, there are two stakeholder groups who are going to pay for it. Your employees and your suppliers,” he continues.