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The Dark Miracle of the Supermarket with Benjamin Lorr
286 Plays13 days ago
We walk into our local grocery store and most likely barely consider what’s on display in front of us. Forty thousand items. Stacked, uniform, produce. Cuisine from around the globe. Open often 24 hours.
As author Benjamin Lorr points out, that can be considered a miracle.
In The Secret Life of Groceries, Ben dives deep into the hidden machinery behind that miracle. He spent years inside the system, working behind a Whole Foods fish counter, riding cross-country with long-haul truckers, and tracing supply chains all the way to shrimp boats in Thailand. What he found is a system that delivers abundance, convenience, and quality at historically unprecedented levels. But it does so by squeezing every inefficiency out of the chain, and often squeezing workers and ecosystems along with it.
In this episode, we dive into:
• Why the modern supermarket truly is miraculous
• How deregulation reshaped trucking and the invisible logistics backbone of food
• What “just-in-time” efficiency means for grocery workers
• The hidden labor dynamics behind ultra-cheap shrimp and other commodities
• Why certifications and labels often can’t fix systemic incentives
• The tension between convenience, price, and ethics
• Whether we actually have the food system we’ve chosen
More about Benjamin:
Benjamin Lorr is the author of Hell-Bent, a critically acclaimed exploration of the Bikram Yoga community that first detailed patterns of abuse and sexual misconduct by guru Bikram Choudhury, and The Secret Life of Groceries, called “a titanic achievement of reportage, insight, humor, and humanity” examining the American supermarket from all angles. Lorr is a graduate of Montgomery County, Maryland public schools and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.
You can buy Benjamin’s books online here or for audiobooks, here.
Follow him on Instagram.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Introduction to Supermarket Abundance
00:00:02
Speaker
The wealthiest of the wealthy 500 years ago couldn't dream of a single aisle in a cramped supermarket in Brooklyn. How do we put the fact that this is a miraculous existence, it's this abundance in context?
The Disappearance of Farms and Rural Economies
00:00:18
Speaker
And then two, when you scratch the surface of that, you get at an incredibly powerful, menacing machine that is providing that abundance
00:00:31
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:43
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward.
The Secret Life of Groceries with Ben
00:00:47
Speaker
Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:00:57
Speaker
Today, we're happy to have Ben join us on the podcast. Ben is author of the book, The Secret Life of Groceries, The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, initially published in 2020, so a few years ago. I had the pleasure of reading this book just a few weeks ago, and it was really like a mind-blowing, for me, expose into this really hidden, secret side of this extremely complex, globalized,
00:01:24
Speaker
supply chain that feeds the supermarket that, you know, we experience every time we go there. To get us started at a high level before we dig into some of the the specific case studies and some of the experiences that you had, the title of the book itself, The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, feel like that outlines a little bit the thesis of your book, but could you start by telling us what is this dark miracle of the supermarket?
00:01:49
Speaker
I mean, I think that's it. I was drawn to this because I really wanted to put the miraculous back into our relationship with the supermarket, which sounds absurd on the the face of it. I grew up in the paradigm where supermarket shopping was basically the most banal chore ever.
00:02:09
Speaker
that you could do. and You wrote a list and you got the spouse who was unlucky, had to go there and like chip away at things. and There's something about its availability, this birthright that we grew up with of ah fluorescent lights and banked hauls of goods that you take for granted just what's on offer in your average supermarket, which is this 65,000 different individuated items that represent a diversity that is greater than any king or pharaoh or emperor in the history of you know the the wealthiest of the wealthy 500 years ago couldn't dream of a single aisle in a cramped supermarket in Brooklyn that I walked through.
Pandemic and Supply Chain Fragility
00:02:59
Speaker
And that is available 24-7. And their stockouts became a thing during the pandemic that supply chain is fragile, but it is remarkably robust. And so one, how do we put the fact that this is a miraculous existence, this abundance in context? Because when it becomes so commonplace, we forget about it. And then two, when you scratch the surface of that and you look behind the machinery that it takes to get that 24-7 abundance, to get the low prices, to get the convenience, to get that shockingly high quality, which is also something I wanted to kind of reframe. I think the modern food debate is like, oh my God, if your yolks aren't the color of like the golden sun, then you're like eating this debased food.
00:03:45
Speaker
Fine, take it or leave it. But like our eggs are really high quality if you were to teleport them back to like 1880s and the average amount of time food would sit as it departed from more rural areas to more urban areas. Like our supply chains are tight. And I wanted to put all that that miracle. and so When you scratch that surface, you get an incredibly powerful, menacing machine that is providing that
Supermarket's Dark Side: Low Prices vs. Quality
00:04:16
Speaker
abundance. and That's where the darkness creeps in. Something that is trying to get that high quality and the low prices and the convenience, those are three things that don't square.
00:04:26
Speaker
They are contradictory values. And so as we try to cram them together at checkout, something gives and there's a lot of friction in the system. And we're going to talk a lot about the dark underbelly of all of this. But I liked how also, I mean, this is something mean people will forget, but at the beginning of the book, you talk about like the rise of the supermarket in the United States and the miracle it was for people at the time and like wives going to the supermarket and fainting when they see the abundance. They were so in awe.
00:04:54
Speaker
People visiting from communist Russia and deciding to do detente, you know, following that. Like we forget how insane the abundance and limitless of it is.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It's always helpful to put that
American Supermarket Innovation
00:05:08
Speaker
in context. So the first supermarket opens in 1930, Michael Cullen, King Cullen. And it was like... 6,000 square feet. Right now we're talking like a Costco is 200,000 square feet, like these superstores. And that 6,000 square foot store is one that people would drive from hundreds of miles to go see because it was like an amusement park attraction that someone could possibly lose their mind and think to build a store this big just for food. That's where housewives would faint and say they were dizzy in the expanse of the store. That was this tiny like relatively so tiny store. The other great touch point I always think of is a supermarket is American as like the T-shirt or jazz or all these like very, it's very American. And the first time it appears outside of America is in 1956 at the food, International Food Congress in Rome.
00:06:01
Speaker
And when it opened there, that store, again, super modest to only 2,500 brands, which if you're talking about the 65,000 in like a modern store, you know, it's, it's, it's nothing, but the Italians went berserk. And like, there's, there was press clippings of the time of like women running up and down the aisle, shouting out, it must be like, this is heaven. And the post,
00:06:25
Speaker
immediately he makes a decree from like the Holy See that the supermarket is this wonderful thing to behold. It's just like a reaction that sounds farcical because we've completely forgotten it.
00:06:36
Speaker
You did an an insane amount of research for this book. I think you said it was like over four years or so. You spent three months working at a Whole Foods store. You spent time on the road with a trucker, Lynn, that we' we'll get to in a second. You spent time on a shrimp farm or shrimp aquaculture Thailand,
00:06:52
Speaker
I would love to dive into some of these case studies because I feel like they really kind of give a picture of this like dark underbelly of where this abundance or at whose expense this abundance comes from. So maybe to get started, we could start with the trucking business.
00:07:08
Speaker
You spent some time traveling with Lynn, a trucker. Could you talk a little bit about your experience and what you learned from spending time with her?
Trucking Realities in a Deregulated Industry
00:07:16
Speaker
Sure. So the woman that I call Lynn in the book, and that is a pseudonym because for the most part, the book uses people's real names exclusively. But when there was a chance that the reporting could like hurt someone's livelihood, and in this case, I definitely thought it it could. I wanted to give them some form of protection. It's an OTR trucker, which is this over-the-road trucker, which is she and she drew she drove a kind of
00:07:42
Speaker
standard reefer unit, which is a refrigerated unit that you see passing on the highways every day. i was just initially drawn to her because the way that logistics have changed in groceries is this like huge underbelly of a story. Like the products still look the same.
00:08:02
Speaker
In many cases, the ways they're produced on the farm are recognizably similar. They're not like night and day different, although there's been enormous technological advances there. But the way that they get from the farm to the shelf and the distribution centers in between those is radically different. And the the efficiency changes there are so are just mind-blowing. And trucking is this huge sector of the economy to make this possible. It's something like the number one employer. When I was writing the book, it was the number one employer in the majority of the states were truck drivers. They're taking like 300 pounds per person per year, I think it is, what
00:08:51
Speaker
Per day. Per day. I have it here. It's 350 pounds per day is trucked around the country per person in America. i mean, that's insane. It's insane. It's this like total leviathan of this of the sector, of the economy. And like our relationship to it is like big truck on highway. And I was like, okay, I like want to learn what that is. It's also, i think in my mind, we're really branded people.
00:09:17
Speaker
from these like 1970s outlaw trucker movies. This may be just me, but in my mind, the trucker was this kind of outlaw character who's independent entrepreneur,
00:09:29
Speaker
on the road, observing America, writes their own rules, Smokey the Bandit. And that is ah it's really outdated because i'll right alongside all these shifts in logistics came a real leaning of the trucking industry, a real making it efficient. I wanted to ride around with a trucker because I wanted to understand what these shifts look like on an individual level.
00:09:54
Speaker
Also, true story, I really just wanted to get into distribution centers. There's enormous secrecy in the grocery industry. It's like a land of trade secrets and like tiny margins and nobody wants to tell you anything. They've been burned by bad press. So if you announce yourself as a reporter and aren't like immediately telling them you're going to write a PR stunt for them, they really, really press shy.
00:10:16
Speaker
A lot of these things that i actually wasn't out to like write an expose on, I just wanted to see with my own eyes like going along and riding shotgun with a trucker was like one of the best ways to get kind of backdoor access. That's what led me to her originally. But quickly I figured out that there was this like parallel story that really the trucker exemplified, personalized, a story of deregulation in our country in a way that's kind of like deregulation is this phrase that can be hard to like understand, or like, you know, kind of cliched. And the trucker in my mind was a face for what happens when we remove regulations from things, make reducing price
00:11:03
Speaker
for, in this case, manufacturers shipping their goods from one place or other and stores receiving them, the only thing that matters. By proxy, this race to the bottom, which is another term you hear about a lot, by like,
00:11:16
Speaker
What's it actually look like? And how is somebody's career affected by it? And so that's what i'm driving around with this woman I call Lynn was like, she was grossing something around, you know, oh gosh, I want to remember the- 200,000 you say in the book. Yeah. Yeah. And she was netting 17,000. And most of the time I was with her, that was probably an overestimate. I mean, she was earning about $100 a week driving around the clock with enormous dedication and maybe a quote unquote unskilled job at the 55 foot blind spot on a truck negotiating that
00:11:55
Speaker
to my mind, requires quite quite a bit of skill and vigilance not to get hurt by. And she exemplified that shaving of gross to net, that $100 weekly take home, the fact that she was responsible as a quote unquote independent entrepreneur, but was ah actually caught in kind of ah like a leasing program that was quite predatory. like linked her to a soul shipper.
00:12:23
Speaker
I got to see the effects of these shifts on a person.
Exploitation in Trucking Training Programs
00:12:27
Speaker
and it was it was I don't want to simplify it too much. It's not necessarily disheartening. It's certainly troubling. and i think that chapter gives you a really decent perspective on the ways that an individual can create meaning for themselves within a horrendously oppressive system.
00:12:47
Speaker
And you follow around Lynn. She's living out of her truck with her two dogs, working. She doesn't have a home. She's living out of the truck, working like 80-hour weeks, if not more, under a lot of pressure, obviously.
00:12:59
Speaker
And ultimately, like grossing like $100. Part of that seems to be because of this like predatory industry that surrounds the owner-operator model in the trucking industry, by which...
00:13:09
Speaker
through these training programs, these people get lured into the program and basically given the promise that they're going to take a loan to buy this truck and get like a lease to own agreement and then over time pay their way into some sort of financial independence. When in fact, there's like 95 to 105% turnover rate year to year in the trucking industry. So basically, people are preying on these like new recruits, training them, saddling them with debt, getting them to work for a year and then basically spitting them back out and starting again. Could you talk a bit more about these like training programs and how they're luring people into these financially unsound schemes?
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that gets at the heart of a lot of the the gulf between the material reality and people's imagination of what the job will be. So trucking, essentially it's student loan programs gone mad. They recruit voraciously for um a lot of retail employees, veterans, you know, I found trucking advertisements in, and their anecdotally, people would talk about them in like homeless shelters overseas to like recruit migrants, people who are looking for a better life. They offer them a promise of credentialing them. It takes this credential to get your CDL license. The catch is that once you get the credential, you're beholden to a single carrier
00:14:31
Speaker
for your work. And that's the way you pay back your experience as a student driver. And then typically you're forced, and I say forced loosely because legally you're not forced, but pressured in an extreme sense while you're in the training program to sign up as an owner operator within a single carrier. And that itself also has some some problematic aspects we can get into. But ah essentially, student truck drivers take on a lot of debt and only have one way to pay it out. And and the way to get some financial freedom in the trucking industry is to take competing bids from lots of different carriers and find some measure of freedom in the industry. But when you're beholden to a single place that's just not available to you, they can charge like low training rates, which you agree to sign up to as part of that until you're often a student driver during that time where you're paid a fraction of the the normal rate. And they can give you more or less time based on your relationship to them. So typically they'll juice these students with lots of hours when they're at these low training rates. But then as that gets to sunsetting, they will...
00:15:41
Speaker
take the number of miles that they're given to the students and start, so it's called starving them out and reduce the number of miles they're getting. So they're they're not actually allowed to drive and then recruit someone new into the student training rate, which is why, as you mentioned, there's incredibly high turnover. in the trucking industry, 95 to 110%, I think, when I was writing the book. And at first glance, you look at that number and you're like, God, this is like a completely unhealthy industry. And it is, but it also an artifact of like this is actually a profit driving force for the owners of these carriers through this starving out method where they recruit lots of people and then push them out to get these really low student rates drivers.
00:16:30
Speaker
Incredibly abusive. And I was telling a friend actually about this, and he was asking me, like, how do they manage to continue to perpetuate this this cycle without, you know, having people warn the next person that, you should you know, you should not do this?
00:16:46
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of low wage workers in America looking to better at their life. I mean, I think that's a starting point. The opening of the funnel is pretty big. Another way they perpetuate it is that hope is like a crazy drug. One, there are a lot of these programs are explicitly religious and I don't actually get into this in the book too much, but there is like a religious component of like doing duty and honor.
Driver Disillusionment and Systemic Exploitation
00:17:12
Speaker
And like I said, they recruit a lot of veterans So a lot of the failure that when we're discussing this seems obviously systemic, it's obvious if we're saying you're getting starved after your miles, you're beholden to a single carrier, that that's not your fault.
00:17:29
Speaker
But the Messaging from the industry is very much about personal responsibility, virtue, duty, ethic, Christ, like literally Jesus Christ. That rhetoric creates a sit feeling of personal failure. And those twin forces of we're offering you tons and tons of hope, and we're also going to crush you and make it feel like your fault, actually doesn't promote a lot of people who walk out of their outrage. They walk out of their demoralized.
00:17:58
Speaker
I will also say there are a lot of people who are outraged and a lot of the access I got to the industry was through lawyers who have a great business. I i can't use many names because what they have this great business of settling large claims with these carriers and and doing so with and NDAs. And so I was able to talk to some of them and they were able to like share either cases that didn't come to a settlement, but they were very close to ones that did or you know give me an outline of the the industry that was it was very eye-opening precisely because there are a lot of people who do enter into litigation and that has exposed some of these secrets.
00:18:38
Speaker
And going back to Lynn, when she joined, was probably expecting to you know actually gross like roughly the 200K that's her top of the line number, but you know ends up with 17K a year, like $100 a week. Could you like quickly walk us through the math there? like Where does all that money go?
00:18:54
Speaker
i mean, a lot of that money goes to repair and maintenance. If you're driving 10,000 miles a week, your repair budget is just not the same as your suburban car.
00:19:09
Speaker
And doing that conversion is tough. It's a real double whammy as an owner operator, you're both responsible for those repairs, you're beholden to the carrier and the carrier's repair shop.
00:19:23
Speaker
And when you're getting those repairs that you're paying a probably non-market rate for, because it's a company store, you're also not driving. And so it's a real it's a real triple threat.
00:19:37
Speaker
People just don't do the math. you know And it's very hard to forecast. It is why you'll have people who are like, oh, I had like a banner three months. And then the story that I tell in the book and the story that I certainly experienced from doing you know, interviews and research around it is that that doesn't, that's not a a stable existence in this section of trucking. I do think it's important to clarify that trucking is a massive industry and there are areas like the home moving section where people like, you know, our car transport that are much more humane and independent operators can make a living. That would be foolish to try to speak for the entire, gosh, 10 billion tons of freight or whatever. I think it's literally 10 billion tons of freight per year.
00:20:20
Speaker
You can't speak to that size industry with these anecdotes. Absolutely. Moving on to the labor in the grocery stores themselves, also massive
Working at Whole Foods: A Consumer Perspective
00:20:31
Speaker
industry. In the book, you talk specifically of Whole Foods, where you went and worked for three months in the fish counter. Could you talk a little bit about what that looks like and and your experience specifically at Whole Foods?
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah. God, it all feels like a crazy dream. This was a while ago. I'm like, yeah, I did work at the fish counter of Whole Foods. And I should say, I didn't just work at Whole Foods. It's not in the book, but I also worked at the Christidis. And i I also signed up. And did do my due diligence, I guess, as ah as like I played the field and really wanted to experience a few different places on the retail floor in the New York area.
00:21:09
Speaker
Partly because I just thought it's such an important part of the customer experience that there's something about writing about groceries that if you didn't have the tactile experience of putting the end product on shelf and dealing with the consumer, you're really missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. Because i think it's very easy to think of these things from the point of view of the
00:21:40
Speaker
profit-seeking corporations and all the structures that are around. But grocery with its tight margin is intensely demand-driven, constantly trying to cater to consumers. And when you're on the retail floor, you just really feel the way that customers for any given bracket, whether it's a Whole Foods bracket, Christidi's bracket, Aldi's bracket, are jockeying for price. and are out there making independent value decisions for themselves, ah how to stretch their dollars as they should. but But that just has ramifications all the way up the chain. So that's what led me there. I just, I kind of wanted to like have that interface moment, you know,
00:22:22
Speaker
The fish counter was on some level, surprisingly pleasant work. I think there's a, you know, there's a sector of grocery for everyone. I think I'm a little bit of a fish counter guy. I'm also a little bit of a green grocer. If I could have fondled broccoli all day and missed it, stacked the apples that that there was something that's kind of nice about that.
00:22:43
Speaker
Of course, I'm doing this in a fairly dilettante-ish way as a reporter, What was interesting to see was the way, and what was ah very eye-opening to me, was the way that these retail jobs have changed due to structural pressures in competitors. so Even a place like Whole Foods, which I think has some leading pay in the industry, good benefits,
00:23:08
Speaker
is really affected by the behavior at non-unionized shops across the street, proverbial across the street, Starbucks and Targets and Chipotles that workers could gravitate towards.
00:23:23
Speaker
And what's happened in these retail jobs over the last... Really, 20 years is, you know, in the book, it's called Just in Time Scheduling, but like a real leaning out of the respect that's afforded to the retail worker, where as an employee, you don't get a schedule that you can depend on. You get a schedule that is determined often just before your shift.
00:23:50
Speaker
Sometimes you don't even know the day that you're you're on call to work 24 hours ahead of time. And it's is all extremely responsive to store demand. There is like a big data, human resources kind of crunching thing of like, how do we keep our staffing decisions as lean as we can, which is where the just-in-time scheduling comes from, just-in-time manufacturing, which was like a way of making really lean supply chain decisions and making sure you just had the inventory you need. Well,
00:24:20
Speaker
When it turns out when you take just the inventory you you need and apply it to human beings in a retail setting, there is an element of cruelty because people have lives that they're trying to structure. You might have two jobs that you're trying to negotiate if you're working at and a retail store. You might have kids that you have to get from pickup or drop off, right? And if you don't know your schedule ahead of time,
00:24:42
Speaker
Not only are you unable to negotiate these things, but your take-home pay is also pretty st stochastic and and jumping around from place to place. And that makes budgeting and depending on the job really difficult. And so again, like a really eye-opening shift about the way the kind of logistical backbone to the grocery store has changed.
Retail Work Challenges: Just-in-Time Scheduling
00:25:04
Speaker
from the model I grew up in. And the model that I had, like I had high school jobs in a retail environment. I worked at ah a bakery and so and kind of poured coffee for customers. But that was a bygone era that does not describe the retail workers of today.
00:25:20
Speaker
And I mean, what's interesting is you you actually don't in your book talk of like the stores that we usually imagine when we think of these practices, like the Walmarts, the Costco's, but you talk of Whole Foods that, you know, brings you in gives you your three days of like the philosophy of of food and they're like yoga room and, you know, conscious capitalism. and then after you go through that, you basically get subjected to the same thing that that they're doing at Walmart, which is basically trying to minimize the amount of time they pay you minimize your benefits. And because of all the like technology and sophistication that they have today, like actually doing an incredibly good job at like cutting every corner to like truly minimize their labor costs, which is one of their largest costs.
00:26:04
Speaker
Totally. You're doing a good job, too, of pulling out this theme that I hadn't really vocalized. I think it's in the book. Really, the juxtaposition and the the way they do this is by there's this extremely sharp, very well-defined structure for cost-cutting that is corporate-run and kind of like fine-tuned. And then that's juxtaposed with these like really soft level kind of cult of personality, cult of capitalism trainings. I mentioned it trucking industry with this like cult of virtue and a personal ethic, but it's really there at Whole Foods and and adjacent places as well, where everything is about teamwork and joining your team. And you you make these the bonds with your coworkers.
00:26:49
Speaker
And it's just enough that when you're working a minimum wage job basically, or just a a bump above minimum wage, that suddenly you're also kind of getting this hostile message that like, yeah, it's okay if you want to take your legally mandated, you know assert your legally mandated rights around scheduling. But you're not being a team player, man, and you're going to really hurt the people who you work with. What a selfish thing to do to to like ask for your schedule a week in advance. That's not what a real team player does. Why don't you go play for some other team if you don't feel like you know if you feel like that? And it it is <unk> rotten. It's his rotten behavior.
00:27:30
Speaker
Absolutely. Moving on to probably the most shocking of them all, at least for me, the shrimp
Modern Slavery in the Shrimp Industry
00:27:36
Speaker
supply chain. And obviously, like since then, been many exposés. I guess first to give context, and you and you know this in the book, there's over 35 million people in the world that are working under basically forced conditions, like effectively modern slavery, which is more than the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade and is responsible for 150 billion in profits. So just to kind of set the context, like Modern, unfortunately, kind of like slave labor is is a reality. And a lot of it is in industries like the shrimp industry that you went and explored. So you you decide to investigate the shrimp supply chain in Thailand.
00:28:14
Speaker
Could you start by talking a little bit about the ways in which it evolved since the 1980s? Because I think like... In a lot of the rest of your book and in a lot of the other industries, like there's a there's a big shift that happened in the 1980s that like really is important to understanding kind of how the industry as a whole has evolved with this deregulation and kind of globalization.
00:28:33
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, shrimp is interesting because, and I think the biggest mistake that you could walk away from is like, oh, that's the shrimp thing. I don't want to eat shrimp. It's so gross. But I did the deep dive into shrimp because it's a microcosm of what the bottom of many supply chains look like, not an exceptional supply chain. you know I actually landed on shrimp because Humanity United, Pierre Omidar, Thibaut,
00:29:00
Speaker
Amityars or the eBay founders you know charity had done this kind of strategic vetting process of 25 major commodities. And they were almost all found to be problematic. And 10 of them, which include coffee, cattle, chocolate, cotton, timber,
00:29:21
Speaker
gold, palm olive, I'm forgetting some of the the others, but like these very fundamental things that we ah think of as like day-to-day commodities in our lives all fell under the same umbrella of highly problematic that shrimp does.
00:29:37
Speaker
And so it's just not an exceptional place in our commodity world. So that's like the proviso that I think is a necessary framing because I hate, hate when people read the book And they're like, oh, well, I'm just not going to eat any more shrimp. Like you really ruined shrimp for me. And I'm like, oh, I really didn't do a good job of explaining why I put this in the book. This is not an indictment of the shrimp industry. In fact, the Thai shrimp industry probably because of the attention of this and a lot of other reporting the AP did and the Guardian did, is one of the supply chains that has the biggest magnifying glass on it and has done the most to reform itself. It's really the problem is with that, to go back to the beginning of our discussion, that triangle of low cost,
00:30:23
Speaker
high quality and convenience that don't align. And when you're trying to chase that on a systemic level, the pressures that get put into the supply chain kind of overheat the whole thing and it gets taken out in labor and the environment.
00:30:38
Speaker
To go to your question on like what shifted, so shrimp agriculture, aquaculture has always kind of existed. People have carved out latin natural ponds and estuaries where they've taken shrimp and raised them. But in the eighties, there was a real effort to industrialize this production, move these away from like tide pools and mangrove swamps and pull them inland, often line them with something. So they're not just natural dirt things, but we're making a pool, you know, cement blind. And that has several big consequences. One
00:31:14
Speaker
In Thailand, at least, a lot of this was done on former rice paddies, which are heavily irrigated crop, but they're not irrigated with salt water. So the second you pull this salt water, brackish water that shrimp need into this, you're toxifying This land and there's kind of no backwards button on it. You can't just like undo this decision.
00:31:38
Speaker
That's bad. And then two, it turns out that when you industrial a farm anything, you know, whether it's a CAFO for cattle or a shrimp aquaculture thing, you just have that confined an environment where the animals are being fed and plumped up as much as possible because you want to grow them as big as possible. It produces excrement. And so you have these like lagoons of brackish, polluted, toxic water. One, an ecological disaster if it floods.
00:32:11
Speaker
Two, creates unhealthy conditions for the shrimp themselves. This is all pretty well publicized, but you know I'm reviewing it, I guess, because it sets the context for the modern world where they have to use some form of antibiotics. And even if they say they aren't, I can tell you that when I was in Thailand and went you know to the local hardware stores, they were in a shrimp producing regions, they all would be selling these antibiotics to someone. That's because the shrimp would just get sick. And it On a local level, it produces these kind of unhealthy conditions. It sounds gross. you don't We don't want to be pumping our antibiotics into our livestock. There's antibiotic resistance. Go down that rabbit hole. But on a kind of a commodity global level, it also produces these big peaks and valleys in the industry where...
00:33:01
Speaker
a region will suddenly go deep into shrimp production. Production will go way high. They'll be making lots of money. do People call pink gold. These real peaks and bounties. And then there's an ecological crash that happens when inevitably a new antibiotic resistant virus or bacteria emerges. and it's not just antibiotic resistant, but something that you can't deal with medically. And then sudden crash and those lagoons become abandoned.
00:33:30
Speaker
That's like one big dark picture. And then the dark picture that I was drawn to is that you have to feed these shrimp and shrimp are carnivorous. It takes about a two pounds of fish to feed one and create one pound of shrimp, maybe a little less. They've gotten very efficient, but regardless, there is an ecological toll.
00:33:52
Speaker
And so the industry has adapted to feed these shrimp, what's known as trash fish. And that's kind of where I entered the scene because the trash fishermen were kind of the most marginalized part of the deep sea fishing area. And Thailand in particular has an extremely,
00:34:11
Speaker
deregulated a smallholder fleet where there's a lot of really independent producers out there. Those smallholders have very little oversight and they're at the way bottom of this chain. They're the ones who are making the food that the shrimp have to eat that then you know the shrimp manufacturers are bargaining for price and the importers and exporters are bargaining for price and the stores are bargaining price. At the way bottom of that are these shrimp farmers. And it's it's just a place where there's the most pressure for abusive labor. And it's where I encountered like kind of the most horrifying forms of of abusive labor.
Human Cost in Global Supply Chains: Tan Lim's Story
00:34:52
Speaker
Yeah. And could you share a bit about the story of Tan Lim, if I'm saying his name correctly? Sure. Aitunlin was one of many different migrants that I interviewed for the book. And i I kind of latched on to him both because he was really willing to put up with a lot of my questions. so So first, he was a Burmese migrant who came to Thailand, was essentially kidnapped. He willingly came to Thailand, looked for a labor broker, was looking for a better life, was very active in his pursuit of a better life. but got picked up by an illegal labor broker who sold him onto one of these fishing boats that collects trash fish.
00:35:33
Speaker
And he sold, and really there is no other good term for it, into you know seafood slavery. he had never been on a boat before this. He had never eaten saltwater seafood, I think. He had like had fish from the river by his his house in...
00:35:54
Speaker
in Myanmar, but he finds himself working 16 to 20 hour days on this boat, being fed instant coffee to like work harder. He goes onto this boat knowing no one except for another trafficked migrant that he was kind of bedding with in this group house where they were living before being put on the boat. And I should say living, but like in a locked room where they couldn't get out and were fed twice a day. Crazy, horrific conditions. His friend is beaten and eventually killed and pushed off the boat.
00:36:29
Speaker
I really go into the details of his life because I think one, on a certain level as extraordinary and as upsetting as those details are, they're again, not as exceptional as we would like to think they are.
00:36:45
Speaker
That the... flow of migrants across the border from Myanmar to Thailand represents a flow that is very common from poor nation to wealthy nation all over the world. it's not This is not a Thai Myanmar problem. This is like a structural wealth problem and people looking to actively better their lives in a place where there's little oversight problem and then Because there's tremendous incentives to get low cheap labor costs, there's a lot of people who illicitly will fill that and organized crime and labor brokers slip right in there because we're all willing
00:37:30
Speaker
to kind of suspend disbelief as to how these labor costs could be so low. And in Thailand's case, because the fleet itself is so independent when you're a fishing fleet and you're out at sea, it's also very hard to get oversight in general. So it's kind of a perfect storm for these very abusive conditions.
00:37:48
Speaker
You end the book with the conclusion, and I'm quoting here, this is to say the great lesson of my time with groceries is that we have got the food system we deserve.
Grocery System and Ethical Concerns
00:37:58
Speaker
The adage is all wrong. It's not that we are what we eat. It's that we eat the way we are.
00:38:03
Speaker
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 pieties,
00:38:14
Speaker
In its current form, it demands convenience and efficiency starting from the checkout counter on down. The results is both incredible and beyond words. Could you elaborate a little bit there, especially on the like food system that we deserve, perhaps how it kind of relates to like the I guess, to a larger question of how we structure our society and our economy?
00:38:37
Speaker
Totally. I mean, on one hand, am I being like an edgelord and trying to like provoke a little bit there? Yes. I think I was born into the Eric Schlosser fast food nation paradigm I wasn't born into this, but that book was enormously influential on me when I was in college. I read Fast Food Nation when it came out. And he does a very similar thing with the fast food industry where he details all the horrendous things that kind of come out of the incentive structures within that. But he ends it with the Burger King mantra inverted, have it your way. and The message is that you can, as a consumer, you can vote with your dollars to create a better system. And that if you choose to behave the right way as a consumer, you can kind of take your ethical structure And make it and in response to that, there was this whole paradigm where we have the organic industry, to name one, which you seem to know much more about than I do, but like also all the certificates and seals that dot our foods from rainforest-friendly to gluten-free to fair trade, right? This whole industry of accreditation and telling consumers that how they're participating in the market got supercharged. It's not fair to put it out on Eric Schlosser's head, but like he was right at the right moment when we all want it. We realize bad things are happening in our food system. We want to change. And I think this book, especially when I got into the certifications and SEALs chapter, which we didn't really talk about, I reached a like end point of that
00:40:18
Speaker
that all of those virtues, which I passionately believe in, i think we should all be personally trying to optimize them, but the market swallows them up.
00:40:29
Speaker
And it really boils down to these er values that I was trying to talk about at the beginning with convenience, with price and quality, the shelf of quality that it takes to even enter into the global system. And that, again, it's not like about the perfectly orange egg yolk. It's just about like an egg that is able to be transported X number of miles and it gets to the refrigerated unit in X number of hours so that its shelf life is long enough to participate in this global distribution system.
00:41:03
Speaker
Those values are ones that we are all reinforcing at the same time that we're reinforcing our pious values around fair trade. Like at the same time we're saying, I want something rainforest friendly, we have real limits on what we will inconvenience ourselves to do and real limits on what we will pay when it comes to a typical like a value structure. So we may pay a lot more for a very expensive tomato that we've been reassured is somehow virtuous, but we won't pay a lot more for the one that's below that and is somehow tainted for whatever variety of reasons. The market is so good at sucking a value out of things and there's so many layers of advertising and marketing.
00:41:54
Speaker
That second tier of kind of pieties is is just one that I think you can't rely on. And the primary virtues that we are kind of unwittingly enacting is what I'm getting at when I talk about the system we deserve. The system we deserve is the one where we're not willing to compromise our time, our convenience, our price decisions.
00:42:16
Speaker
And we show that every time we price comparison shop at the checkout. And I'm not delivering the message that you shouldn't do that. And that's why this is a broken system. If we had a really easy solution here, we would all adopt it. Nobody likes this. The grocers don't like this. The guys who are making them those decisions at the very top don't like that they're trapped in a race to the bottom. But like human beings, ultimately, when it comes down to it, we look out for ourselves in a real way. And we have been really stuck in a system where the apparati of government and larger six systems have not stepped in to fill that void where, you know, one could imagine they might.
00:42:55
Speaker
I mean, maybe another way to say that is that a system based on abundant, cheap food is inherently going to come at the expense of the environment and of the people that work in that supply chain.
00:43:10
Speaker
And there's no way around that. And Yes, consumers should do their best and perhaps should put more effort and time and money into trying to eat better. But fundamentally, it also comes down to the corporations that are involved in the supply chain as well who are driven by profit right now. And that profit is incompatible is not aligned with you know what's best for like the holistic picture.
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's well said. i think what gets problematic for me is when you target specific areas, either one of two things happen. Either you end up demonizing someone who is actually fairly helpless or is locked in their own incentive structures that are hard to Or you end up asking for a form of government regulation that people, again, say they might want, but when it gets enacted are uncomfortable with the trade-offs that it brings. Because if there is going to be a globalized labor or environmental standards, which I would offer as like the paradigm for a solution in a globalized economy, that we don't want like abusive migrant labor flows and we don't want this to like, the industry just displaces problems from one region to the next. That's the whole narrative.
00:44:31
Speaker
If we don't want that, we need to have some type of globalized environmental standards. And if we have those standards, we need some way of enforcing that. And if we have some way of enforcing that, then we're talking about some type of,
00:44:42
Speaker
police authority structure. And all of a sudden, like it has to be funded from somewhere. It's going to raise the cost of these things. And the, the will to enact this stuff starts getting sapped from the enormity of the problem. And so people try to solve it within the current paradigm by you know Oh, we'll just create some oversight committee that will look at the supply chain in more detail.
00:45:06
Speaker
And so the solution set that doesn't cause those ripple effects is pretty faulty. And the solution that might have a problem, we keep rejecting because there's it comes with some trade-offs that makes people really uncomfortable.
00:45:18
Speaker
I'm curious whether you would see a role for relocalizing more of the system. I love It it involves consumers only wanting to have local products. So like you really have to retrain people. Guess what? Big top-down retraining programs have a really bad history. Like you ultimately this stuff has to be voluntary, right? For it to really fly.
00:45:40
Speaker
at least with, again, within the current paradigm of like people who have, you are used to the lots of choices. But yeah, I personally like that. I'm totally bought in. i think I have a perspective that makes that voluntary choice seem very reasonable. i also have a lot of free time. I'm a writer, so I can cook an extravagant meal with root vegetables that in, you know, in the fall, that I think is a privilege that somebody who's harried and working two jobs and just wants to like get some calories on their plate, like might not be able to make my like fall banquet meal that makes sweet potatoes and butternut squash tasty.
00:46:18
Speaker
Yeah. And some of the people that are working those two jobs might be working in the food industry. Totally. I mean, look, I always tell people, like i'm I'm really negative about lots of aspects in this book, but farmer's market, direct consumer relationships with agriculture producers, like I got nothing negative to say about that. Somebody who makes something, a local producer, and you look at them and you're like, I trust this guy. and you're getting that product, that is a real healing act.
00:46:45
Speaker
I think that is also a privilege. Like, it's just the fact that like shopping at farmer market is not for everyone right now. But yeah, so I love it. And I guess to finish this off, it's been a few years since this book was
Reception of 'The Secret Life of Groceries'
00:46:59
Speaker
published. Yeah, what's been the response to your book? And and perhaps what was what was most surprising for you with respect to the the response you got?
00:47:06
Speaker
The book has had long legs, which I like and have been surprised by in the sense that it came out yeah five years ago, over five years ago. It first found a real home with the business community from this conversation. I don't think anyone listening would ever guess that. But like the first people who were inviting me to go speak and talk were like grocers. They were like, oh my God, I feel seen by your book. You understand this. This is like somebody who's written the first like accurate book about the grocery industry. You're not just demonizing us.
00:47:41
Speaker
And you also understand a lot of the trade-offs. And also like the book has a long story on Trader Joe, who's this real innovative dude. And they're like, this is fascinating. I just actually want to learn more about how Trader does does business. So like like Amazon like offered speaking You know, like it was all this crazy business people who i having finished this book, was like, this is not my target audience. I just wrote this weird, raging critique of capitalism. I didn't intend to do that, but like it just turned into this book that really uses grocery as a way of exploring the race to the bottom in commodity markets.
00:48:16
Speaker
And then so that business community fell off, then it was discovered, thankfully, by the people that I think it's most appropriate for, which are people who are looking for an honest critique of the system and thinking about solutions, which the book, again, does not really offer, but I think it provides good fodder. for people who are want to think about those solutions without rosy colored glasses on or easy demons to demonize. Since then, it's also it's found its way into like wacko right circles because they can latch on to the idea that there's like a global grocery cabal, which doesn't really exist. But it's really found a number of different odd markets over the years.
00:48:56
Speaker
you know Food, it's it's part of all of us. So I'm really happy that ah it finds lots of different audiences. Yeah, it's part of all of us and it's kind of a microcosm for all of the societal challenges and that that we face. So it makes sense.
00:49:11
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ben, for talking with me today. Really enjoyed it and really grateful for your time and for your book and definitely... recommend anyone interested to go check it out and order it. The Secret Life of Groceries.
00:49:25
Speaker
Honestly, really, really cool book and also written and a very fun way with some wit and kind of dark sarcasm maybe that makes it ah a very fun read. i hope so. Sometimes I do these talks and then we get talking about all the darkness in the book and I'm like, I think it's kind of an an upbeat or like it's an kind of a fun read maybe i hope that was i definitely it targeted it in my mind as like a beach read or like something that's light no i don't know about a beach read that's my dream i want to just write a beach read right now i'm working on a book on the elder care world and and i'm desperately trying to reframe that into a beach read which will be that'll be my ultimate non-fiction goal very cool
00:50:10
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. is It's a real pleasure. Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:50:25
Speaker
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