The Secret Life of Groceries Quotes

“I had watched organics and fair trade explode into billion-dollar industries. But it was hard to say the world was becoming a better place for the marginal spending. In fact, it felt like it was becoming a more insulated one. I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“What appears to be happening is that the industry has figured out not only how to make humans replaceable but also how to make money off their replacement. The labor shortage is profitable.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“The real object of our scorn might not be in our food safety standards, in the revolving-door regulators, in the rise of industry, or even in the abuse and commodification of men, but in ourselves as agents in this world: for knowing what we want and what we are willing to give up to get it, for understanding that this is a moral outrage we’ve been digging for all along because it verifies what we know but also don’t quite want to acknowledge about ourselves.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Commodity is contempt all the way down, and wandering the ALDI distribution center I realize just how much materialism depends on individuality, on our ability to inject meaning into things.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Along the way, there were minor tweaks. Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma City grocer, introduced the shopping cart in 1937.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“All these individually wrapped products beget something even more precious to us. Choice. As synonym for control. In a world without boxes lit with insignias, colors, and slogans, there is little need for a consumer to touch anything. It’s all the same. But suddenly, with cardboard boxes flying off the factory line, the greedy tentacles of customer demand are excited; they head to the general store and request particular products.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“By 1900, the shift is momentous: packaged food is responsible for one-fifth of all manufacturing in the United States. Modern life does not exist without this shift.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“in 1890, Robert Gair of Brooklyn begins to manufacture precut, easy-to-fold boxes. The effect on the grocery store cannot be overstated: regular shipments of products suddenly make economic sense. Producer and retailer become connected in a far more consistent manner.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Too often during these media storms, I’ve heard people say, let’s boycott this product,” Simon Baker, a migrant researcher, explains. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground. In my research, I’ve found this often means going into sex work . . . What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“If anything, this is a conspiracy of good intentions, convincing ourselves in circles that we are doing just enough not to require any uncomfortable action, replacing the terror of a gargantuan world with a feeling of control.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“In trafficking, the media focuses on why and where poor people get into difficult situations. But maybe we should be looking at why they are poor to begin with?”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“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;”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“People are skittish and insane when it comes to their food. They not only want, they demand, through buying power, completely impossible, unsustainable opposites—low price and high quality, immediate availability and customized differentiation—and then react apoplectically to the often ingenious, if Frankensteinian, solutions industrial food creates to bridge the gap.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“In this sense, grocery is a story still being written. In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers. Then somewhere, after centuries, we woke to the fact that our tools had become too powerful—our monocultures, pesticides, and mine scalings—the tools just as fearsome as the nature they set out to rein in, and we found ourselves cowering once again. This is the typical end point, with our Frankensteins and atomic Godzillas. A daily alienation updated almost as a background app into our iPhone addictions and queasy feelings about social media we just can’t quit. But what we’ve begun to see, what I certainly learned writing this book, is that we’ve undertaken a new project. We decided that, caught between two awesome external forces—nature everlasting, and these new tools of our own creation—the one piece in the whole operation that was most malleable was us. Our selves. That we would happily trade away aspects of our lives—be it community or duty or eccentricity or care—for an ability to survive between them.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“2020, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ food audits are but a multimillion-dollar drop in the $50 billion-per-year bucket that is the for-profit auditing industry.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Lawrence is wrong and Andy is out. Whole Foods has let him go. They are working on a new, more efficient way of training employees, and his position has been “restructured.” And so the single most enthusiastic person, the truest true believer I met in my time in retail, the guy whose answer to everything was just work harder and trust that things will work out, has found out exactly whom to trust, exactly how hard things can work out.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“My experience is that there is an abundance of labor. I went to three different Whole Foods hiring sessions, and each one was packed with hopeful applicants. But that does not translate into an abundance of Walters. Unfortunately for WFs, they don’t seem to care about the distinction.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Something that makes us feel we should be oppressing someone to make it all make sense. And, of course, that something is real. Actually there are many somethings.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“But for the overwhelming number of people I talked with, being asked to smile and be nice to people didn’t come close to tops in terms of a grievance.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“One manager repeatedly tells us, “We live in Yes town,” which he always clarifies by saying, “That means we never say no,” in a way that makes him sound like even more of an imbecile than it makes us feel.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“diversity of human whim often allows it to do double duty, serving one through the act of serving another.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“people, in general, are hideous and”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“A process that continues every day for the two months that I work there.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“it doesn’t take long to realize that more than anything we are maintaining a mortuary here at the fish counter—keeping all our skinned dead friends looking glam for the customer.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“The next day we return and do it all again. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow except to say, by hour 5.5 on day 2, I look up to see we are at slide 27 of 145 of the PowerPoint and I want to cry.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“Then suddenly, “Health is wealth!” he exclaims, to my relief. “Health for the planet, wealth for the store!”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“We aren’t at a food conference. This is the hive mind of my condiment drawer, a gibbering id of anxiety and acquisition, responsible for all those decaying bottles in my fridge. The act of “doing” the Fancy Food Show is a little like a yuppie Halloween.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation. The most satisfied truckers I meet are the ones who have explicitly recognized and chosen that trade-off.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket