In the tradition of literary muckrakers, Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries exposes the true cost of cheap food. Weaving history, statistics, experiences and interviews, Lorr investigates the sourcing, production, distribution and sales of retail food products. The most compelling chapters focus on the people tethered to an industry that maintains margins of 1.5% as food prices have fallen nearly three-fourths over the past century ... Extensive footnotes with quirky asides, social commentary and resources are a break from so much disturbing and often hilarious information, and the many hard truths are relayed with empathy ... Every grocery store shopper is linked to this chain; no reader of this ambitious book will enter a store the same.
You might imagine that of the five senses, taste and sight would be the most frequently invoked in a book about groceries, but Lorr’s book hits you hardest through the nose .. Lorr, though, is not on an Upton Sinclair quest to nauseate readers into changing their consumption habits. Instead, The Secret Life of Groceries is a deeply curious and evenhanded report on our national appetites ... I started The Secret Life of Groceries expecting that more of it would take place within the four walls of supermarkets. But Lorr’s more far-flung chapters, tracing supply chains and labor practices, yield characters rendered more richly than you often get in the pop-biz genre.
Lorr explores how the food we buy (never mind whether we actually eat it) is a proxy for our values. And as those values turn into personal choices — as well-meaning as they might be — we are complicit in the cruelties of the broader food system ... You won’t soon forget Lorr’s description of the smell he endured while cleaning the fish display cases when he was an employee at Whole Foods, a job he took to research the book ... Lorr balances the doom with a conversational style and occasional dark humor ... casual descriptions are a diversion from the book’s heartbreaking stories but such generalizations compromise the otherwise powerful reporting.
...readers may find a dangerous urgency—especially amidst COVID-19-related stay-at-home orders—to the deep psychological dependency on a well-stocked supermarket. Lorr’s exploration of the systems and individuals that create the modern grocery store will move readers to ask far more probing questions about what they’re putting on the table. For fans of Michael Pollan’s work and Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery (2017).
...horrifying ... Fortunately for those making money off the whole enterprise, dead shrimp can tell no tales. Lorr’s book is about precisely this kind of half-known horror, and his barely exhaustive investigation into shrimp hits a bull’s-eye of moral hypocrisy in American society ... maddeningly poignant.
Lorr offers a stark perspective ... Lorr succeeds in raising awareness of the people who make our food systems possible and the conditions in which they live and work. Yet the stories do not always effectively cohere to create a well-rounded narrative.
