Ugly truth about markets
“On the one hand, the supermarket is the most banal, mundane place,” said Benjamin Lorr, the author of the new book, “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” standing in the produce aisle of a Trader Joe’s in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, N.Y., a short stroll from his apartment.
“But sometimes,” he continued, “I walk in and I feel like I’m tripping. I’m in this surreal experience of abundance and choice. It’s like ‘Alice in the Wonderland’ for adults.”
You’ll have to excuse Lorr, 41, if he feels an equal sense of awe and dread about the American supermarket. He just spent five years exploring the glorious veneer and dark underbelly of an American institution that, in its way, is as much a symbol of 20th-century capitalism as Henry Ford’s assembly line.
His book, published this month, combines the muckraking approach of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” with the wry travelogue approach of a Michael Moore movie. It is a first-person journey through every conceivable link on the grocery supply chain.
He slung wild salmon at a Whole Foods fish counter, lived on beef jerky and Gatorade on a grueling eight-state journey with a longhaul trucker, sneaked into giant pig and chicken factory farms with animal activists, and interviewed the equivalent of modern-day slaves in the Thai fishing industry.
Along the way, he came to see upscale supermarkets like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods as temples of conscious consumerism, serving not just as a clubhouse for hyperinformed foodies, but also a theater in which they can act out their putatively superior taste, education and virtue.
As he expounded on how the supermarket is “an expression of how you value your body, and your relationship to Mother Earth,” Lorr pushed his red grocery cart through aisles brimming with organic produce, fair-trade coffee and quirky packaged items like kale gnocchi and fig butter.
As he weaved through the pro
duce aisle amid shaggy young professionals wearing design-forward masks, Lorr recalled seeing fellow yoga students “descend on Trader Joe’s with maniacal glee” when he was reporting his 2012 book “HellBent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga,” which peeled back the curtain on the sweaty, and at times abusive, Bikram yoga scene.
“To me, it seemed like a stand-in for the entire cult of food.”
He credited Joe Coulombe, who founded Trader Joe’s in the 1960s, for shattering the idea that supermarkets could only thrive on massmarket branded staples.