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A review by mysteriesbooks
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
informative
medium-paced
4.0
If you're expecting a step by step breakdown of how food gets from the farm to your Walmart aisle, this might not exactly be what your looking for. Lorr jumps from topic to topic; from the foundations of the first grocery store, to the weird beginnings of Trader Joe's, to the fact that the American trucking industry is built on indentured servitude. And it very well could be the 'tism in me that naturally talks like this with my friends, that made it so that I didn't mind it so much as some other reviewers.
Yes, we topic jump, but each sections' topics I was fully invested in and enthralled with where we were going. It was equal parts fascinating as it was horrifying. If anything, I would recommend the book for the trucker section and the fishing industry look alone.
That all said, I wasn't held quite as tightly during our look into the founding's of Trader Joe's, and Lorr comes into this with so much privilege from his white upper class background, that his shock that there's no ethical consumerism in capitalism was sometimes grating.
Yes, we topic jump, but each sections' topics I was fully invested in and enthralled with where we were going. It was equal parts fascinating as it was horrifying. If anything, I would recommend the book for the trucker section and the fishing industry look alone.
That all said, I wasn't held quite as tightly during our look into the founding's of Trader Joe's, and Lorr comes into this with so much privilege from his white upper class background, that his shock that there's no ethical consumerism in capitalism was sometimes grating.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery
Moderate: Sexual assault