I grew up in a small mountain town and going grocery shopping was always a full-day experience. My mom was strategic. The day involved a 30-mile drive to the first stop and hours of multi-market hopping. She had a shopping list template saved on our family desktop, organized by aisle by store by season. With the list as our Bible, grocery shopping was essentially my religion. Like any good California-raised kiddo, Trader Joe's was my favorite stop and it was also usually the last. Sometimes I was lucky and got to pick out a special treat, often Toffuti cuties, which I recently learned not many people know about.  One of my first memories of grocery shopping was learning how to bag groceries at Trader Joe’s. I was hooked. After that, for fun, I'd pretend to bag groceries in my bedroom for my stuffed animals, using my toy register and Monopoly money to ring them up. I even hand wrote receipts. In a surprise to absolutely no one, I now insist on bagging my own groceries and have major anxiety when it's done for me and even worse when it's ~done the wrong way~.

The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr changed the way I think about food, and that says a lot coming from me. I’ve read countless books about foodways, restaurants, agriculture, cooking - you name it and I’ve probably read it. Yet there are so many moments in this story that made me sigh (and gasp). Moments of resonance, of relief, of frustration, and of pure amazement. Anyone who has worked at Whole Foods will love this book... or any grocery store for that matter. While reading, it feels like you have bundles of inside jokes with Lorr, and like your experiences as a grocery worker haven’t gone unnoticed. It’s reading the chapter about fancy snacks and the journey to hell and back that is required to push your product to market and realizing that your undergrad daydream of ~maybe I’ll sell gourmet pickles~  probably wasn’t the best idea anyway. And then thanking the grocery gods that you didn’t go down that route. It’s thinking of the women in trucking who carry the weight of sexual abuse while they are zig-zagging our food and luxuries across the country. It’s always knowing the person behind Trader Joe’s was pure genius, but now have the proof. I’ve always tried to be conscious about where I buy and source my food, but the biggest takeaway from The Secret Life of Groceries is that no matter what you buy, where it was grown or made, there is a story behind it that you never considered. If you are looking for a humorous, well-researched read to add to your foodie book collection - don’t miss this read.