Reviews with content warning for Animal death - The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

I listened to the audio book, which I think kept me far more interested than I would have been in the book itself. Great journalism, and I appreciated how he took the reader through various stages in the grocery processes. My only critique is that right here in the US we have agricultural slavery, abuses and a migrant crisis - I would have loved to see the author look into for example strawberries instead of Thailand (though I was very interested in that story as well). Additionally, the author sometimes used pretty unflattering descriptions for their subjects which I felt to be kind of unneeded and a weird pot-shot at times. I don’t know if I would recommend this to anyone but it was good, nothing super unique I have to say

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jhbandcats's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced

5.0

This is an extraordinarily powerful book about Americans’ insatiable desire for high quality, low cost, and convenient food, and the paths it takes in its way into our kitchens. Parts were so appalling and horrific it made me think I should never eat again - the costs in human misery and environmental damage are just too high.

Benjamin Lorr is clever and witty, and his research is detailed and in-depth. He worked on this book for five years, working at grocery stores, interviewing titans of grocery industry, riding with long-haul truckers moving food from warehouse to grocery hub, and travelling to Southeast Asia to witness the effects of human trafficking and slavery in the shrimp farming business. At no point whatsoever did my attention lag - this book is compelling from beginning to end.

This book should be required reading for any American who buys food. Really truly.

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elly29's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative medium-paced

4.0

This is a set of five stories: ones about Trader Joe's, trucking, the creation of a product called "slawsa," a brief interlude at Whole Foods, and Thai shrimp fishing. Each story has its own hero, which is tangential to but not necessarily the heart of grocering as I perceived it before starting this book. Lorr as a writer is perceptive and pithy, although at times his prose is overwritten. He's better at seeing bigger pictures and trends, rather than exhaustive depth of a contained subject.

The most satisfying part to me was the part about slawsa and the surrounding experiences. I wanted to know more, though, about the stores and the retail. This book didn't feel exhaustive on that count; rather, it was a sweeping look at the food production industry from raw material to final packaged goods. I wanted to know more about slotting fees and pay-to-play, about the organization of the products, and how the products get onto shelves from a business standpoint. (The manufacturing plant that will agree to do your salsa... in addition to their own slightly different brand, and another partner's still yet slightly different brand, was *fascinating*, and how these big manufacturers play a part in food trends -- say like using avocado oil or coconut oil in their products -- was also fascinating. And yes, it is also logical that he spends an entire part on trucking, because that is how goods are distributed.)

He talks about how Trader Joe's products offer an intellectual reward to their over-educated and underpaid consumers, and inside joke if you will. They would "read secret messages on the products," hence the Heisenberg's Uncertain Blends of coffee that had spilled on the conveyer belt in unknown quantities, or the "Darwins" and "Next to Godliness" products, which are vitamins and cleaning products, respectively.

This will make you never want to eat again. (It includes slave trafficking of migrant workers for the fishing industry in Thailand, predatory debt for commercial truck driving students, sexual harassment [I give this book a rape content warning, because of just how awful trucking is to women], and how useless audits of food quality are.) I also think of how fragile our grocery system is -- and how covid, or war, can tip it out of balance.

There's a salient line about how convenient the shrimp is, and that the human rights violations will make you hate your shrimp but eat it, too. That is the grocery business.

Interesting & Wild Facts:

To stimulate reproductive development so that they can produce even more shrimp, the eyestalks of female shrimp are ablated (cut off). Otherwise, in overcrowded environments, female shrimp get stressed and don't mature. ...why was having an eyestalk cut sleeted for, and what shrimp farmer noticed this?

You'd think farming would reduce the need for fish trawlers. But to produce one pound of shrimp, it takes two pounds of protein -- usually from wild-caught fish. So when the number of shrimp aquaculture rose 5x between the 1970s and today, the amount of fish protein brought in by trawlers to feed the shrimp farms grew 10x.

35 million people work under coersion per year.

Interesting Quotes:

"[Trucking] is a lifestyle that pounds home that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation."

"Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, all 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 mesomorph bodies into something more metabolically equivalent, all while making similar grandiose predictions about the disruptiveness of their own app or innovation, whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large."

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mlewis's review

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adventurous funny hopeful informative reflective fast-paced

4.5

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