The Secret Life of Groceries: a book review

On a whim I picked up Benjamin Lorr’s investigative journalism book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, and walked away with a newfound respect for the people who allow us the modern miracle (dark as it may be) of having almost unlimited food options in every grocery store in the western world. We forget that the grocery store as we know it is a fairly new invention, coming into being last century and used as propaganda to bolster support for capitalism. That food is as inexpensive and as abundant as it is, is indeed a miracle when considering the course of human history.

But oh, the price we pay for such convenience and abundance. Lorr doesn’t resort to preachiness, pointing an accusatory finger at greedy Americans. In fact, he willfully acknowledges all the benefits of today’s grocery stores, while highlighting many of the downsides of the grocery industry, particularly as it pertains to the challenging lifestyles of many of the people who devote their careers to meeting consumer demands. Lorr spends significant time with the people who make it all possible: the founder of Trader Joe’s (Joe Coulombe), a Whole Foods employee manning the seafood counter, a female long-haul trucker, an entrepreneur trying to get a new condiment onto grocery store shelves, a man who’s spent years on a shrimping boat. Lorr shines a light on the people we take for granted, and does so in a caring, meaningful way. Hearing directly from his subjects as they share stories about their often-difficult lives, I felt not only sympathy for them, but gratitude that they make my comfortable life possible.

Surprisingly, The Secret Life of Groceries isn’t a call to action in the obvious sense. Lorr doesn’t end the book with “five things American consumers should be doing to make the world a better place.” He actually does the opposite, offering little more than a shoulder shrug at our current plight, conceding that there is virtually nothing consumers can do in their purchasing habits to change the system. Rather, “any solution will have to come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done. At best, food is an opening, like any maw, that might lead us inside.”

What about buying organically certified foods? Or products produced from cage-free chickens? Or going vegan? Of this, Lorr writes that seals and certifications “promise us that moments of individual action can create a type of change that in reality only institutional forces like labor laws, unions, and trade deals can begin to approach. They allow us to purchase our ideals from others without ever having to enact them on our own.”

Perhaps not the message readers would like to hear, but also kind of refreshing. It’s not going to stop me from buying 100% recycled paper or using canvas bags, but I get it: my actions aren’t solving the problem; they’re making me feel good. Lorr concludes, “…we have got the food system we deserve. The adage is all wrong: it’s not that we are what we eat, it’s that we eat the way we are.”

If for no other reason than to get a better understanding of all that’s involved in the global industrial food complex, I highly recommend this book.

The Big Short and Being Human

Back in the late 80s when I attended UW-Madison, I had a conversation with a fellow student and expressed my opinion that the way we value a nation’s economy is going to have to change – that we can’t continue to measure economic growth largely by how much of its natural resources we’re expending. In essence, I argued that the entire world economy is a one giant Ponzi scheme (though I didn’t know the term Ponzi scheme until Bernie Madoff entered the picture). I still believe this to be the case. After all, a stock’s price is supposedly the present value of all future earnings, but we know that most companies that exist today will one day disappear and be sold for peanuts (Pan Am, Blockbuster, Enron, Woolworths, Tower Records), and the present value of a string of zeros is zero, so we’re really betting on short-term earnings. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who has a rare long view when it comes to business success recognizes that his company will one day be disrupted and perhaps no longer exist (watch 13:20 of this 60 Minutes video).

It’s one thing to have this viewpoint about a system that’s largely on the up and up: that’s run by smart people with good intentions but who sometimes fall short or make mistakes. It’s quite another to discover that the people driving our economy are incompetent, greedy, short-sighted, ruthless criminals. If you’ve seen The Big Short or read the Michael Lewis book upon which the film is based, you’ll likely spend some time rethinking your investment strategy. After all, does it make sense to invest your retirement savings in corporations run by buffoons? The answer: what choice do you have? If you could earn 5% guaranteed in CDs you might do so, but you can’t, so if you’re like me you’ll throw the dice and hope that the pyramid scheme of the U.S. economy can hang in there for a little while longer.

I tried reading The Big Short a few years ago and had some difficulty. It does get complicated. But having a visual helps me enormously, and the film’s director Adam McKay (of Anchorman fame) does a marvelous job of acknowledging the complexity of the movie’s subject while helping the audience along the way. I still left the movie with a few lingering questions (that I hope to answer by giving the book another shot), but generally felt more informed than when I arrived, while still being entertained in between. 

No small feat.

Michael Lewis has a terrific piece in the week’s Vanity Fair that describes the minor miracle that any of his books have been made into movies (and successful ones at that: Moneyball, The Blind Side), least of all a film about credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. You’ll also learn what you likely already knew: that incompetence and greed are as prevalent in Hollywood as they are on Wall Street. 

If only it ended there. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s Wall Street, Hollywood, government agencies, the Chicago police force, horny priests, Oregon ranchers or religious zealots: we as humans seem to be preprogrammed to abuse power, blur the lines between right and wrong, desire more even when we have enough, sacrifice long-term benefits for short-term gains, and hurt people for our own benefit. So why is it when we read about our brethren behaving badly we feel smug about it and think we would never fall into the same trap despite history telling us otherwise?

There are different schools of thought here. My own viewpoint is that religion – for all its faults – helps ground us in humility and gratitude, two essential ingredients to keep from following our worst instincts. Perhaps the people running our biggest firms would do well to spend more time in the pews or our nation’s religious institutions and less in the office.

But then how do you explain the clergy sex abuse scandal? Yeah, that's tricky. After you see The Big Short go watch the marvelous film Spotlight and then tell me your faith in mankind hasn’t been just a wee bit shaken.

From Too Many People to Not Enough

Jonathan V. Last contributed a very interesting article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal about America’s declining population rates and the negative consequences it’s generating.  Just when you thought that we were getting world population under control, you can now sleep uneasily as our country tailspins into zero growth for the foreseeable future. 

Today, America's fertility rate is at 1.93, below the replacement rate of 2.1, and according to Last, the United States has been leaning on immigrants and their higher birthrates for our continued growth and innovation over the past several decades.  This will eventually dry up, he claims, which means the United States will ultimately need to fix this mess.  How?  By having more babies, of course.

But fixing the problem isn’t as simple as just telling people to make more babies, because the author deduces – and this is a gem of a deduction – “the problem is that, while making babies is fun, raising them isn't.”  He writes, “A raft of research shows that if you take two people who are identical in every way except for childbearing status, the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be ‘very happy’ than the nonparent. (That's just for one child. Knock off two more points for each additional bundle of joy.)”

Now they tell me.

But whereas Last is rather pessimistic about America’s future, (he concludes: "Can we keep the U.S. from becoming Japan? in the long run, the answer is, probably not."), I’m more optimistic, at least in this respect.

Last’s most interesting suggestion to help thwart the decline in population growth is revamping the University system, which is clearly broken and which has pushed off child-rearing years past what it was in the early twentieth century.  Last suggests encouraging education systems to respond to market demands and create opportunities for students to get basic “no-frills” degrees. 

This is already starting to happen.  Three-year degree programs are becoming more common, and on-line opportunities in education are spreading rapidly.  In Time Magazine’s October 29, 2012 issue, Amanda Ripley wrote about the influx of startup MOOCs (massive open online courses) like Udacity, Coursera and edX, who’ve put college-level courses on-line for – at least for now – free.  But even after these and other institutions rely on fees, Ripley concludes, “One way or another, it seems likely that more people will eventually learn more for less money.”

And what’s really cool is that on-line courses are teaching in ways that are more productive than the traditional methods universities have always relied on.  As part of her research, Ripley took an on-line physics course and was surprised to learn that the class was taught “according to how the brain actually learns.  It had almost nothing in common with most classes I’d taken before.”  The class included fast-paced videos, interactive opportunities for students to answer questions, positive reinforcement for answering correctly, opportunities to fix incorrect answers, and games to apply the lessons they just learned.

Regardless of where people get educated in the future - whether it's on-line or through brick and mortor establishments - the competition that on-line eduation programs provide will eventually have a big impact in how people are educated, how much it costs, how much debt they incur, and – ultimately – how many babies they have.

And look, even if we can’t fix our university system and if our current immigration dries up, we can consider the following: the United States National Research Council estimates that sea levels will rise 2 to 6 ½ feet by the end of this century.  If they're correct, perhaps we can rely on a new wave of immigrants to feed our need for population growth: the Polynesians.