A review by liralen
Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, by Michael Ruhlman
3.0
Dad and I watched Mom making Julia Child’s recipe, or rather spectated, because she brought the making of béarnaise to the level of entertainment: The more butter, the better, but add too much and the sauce would break, the thick emulsion collapsing into soup; no one understood why. Mom insisted on giving the sauce a sporting chance to break and so always added more butter, to our alarm and excitement. Bam! Gasp! Cooking could be entertainment. (11)
Ruhlman’s Grocery explores—you guessed it—a subset of the American grocery store. Ruhlman focuses on ‘small’ groceries, although his definition and mine (and perhaps yours) differ: he’s looking at size from an economic perspective, which is to say that the margins and profits are small even if the company is a chain with many stores spread across a large geographic area.
Groceries changed as food supply changed, and it’s that shift that Ruhlman tracks more than, say, the day-to-day work that goes into keeping a grocery running. He’s less interested in operations than discussing what we eat, and what we cook, and what we can’t be fussed with. Take broccoli: A child growing up in the early twentieth century probably didn’t know whether he or she liked broccoli, because it didn’t really exist in America. Thomas Jefferson is said to have brought seeds back from Italy, where it has grown for centuries, and planted them here in 1767. But American farmers didn’t start growing it until the 1920s. And major production didn’t begin until after World War II. Now we each eat on average nearly six pounds of it a year. (206)
(Not until the 1920s! But I’m also over here thinking, what? Only six pounds a year?)
Some of it I found markedly less interesting. I’ve read enough books that go into the benefit of whole foods, and the rise of process foods, that at this point I’m looking for something new if that’s what a book talks about, and I don’t think this really offers that newness. There’s a very long wander into nutrition and wellness, and it’s fine and all, but it’s not so much about groceries—it’s about telling people what’s good for them.
This is not a judgment on what you choose to eat. If you hunger for a cheese product grilled between bread that’s been stripped of its nutrition, along with a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup (made with tomato paste, corn syrup, and potassium chloride), fine. It was one of my favorite childhood meals. Just be aware. Buy fat-free half-and-half if that’s what you like, but know what it is you’re putting into your body (and your children’s bodies) and why. Because, and this is the judgment call, fat isn’t bad, stupid is bad. (103)
Take out the second parenthetical there, and I think you can get away with saying that quotation isn’t a judgement, but…but you’d have to take out the second parenthetical. There ends up being quite a lot of opinion in the book and what is and isn’t worth eating, and a deviation into whether or not meat is ethical, which…I don’t know. If even the writer admits that his arguments for eating meat are facile (191), maybe he…shouldn’t be making those arguments? I’m saying this as someone who has been vegetarian for almost the entirety of my life—I don’t know what meat tastes like—and also someone who knows there are more and less ethical ways to consume meat, and that people should make up their own damn minds. But I cannot read I believe existence is an end in itself, and if we didn’t raise pigs and chickens and cows for their meat, eggs, and milk, they would exist, if at all, only in the wild, a more cruel and unforgiving place than a farm or feedlot (191) and take it seriously. Is it really better for chickens to have short lives pressed together in an overcrowded production house than to have short lives out in the wild? (Animals did just fine in the wild before humans entered the picture.)
Okay. Rant over. Let’s get to the…meat…of the thing, or at least what could be the meat but wasn’t: impact of gender roles. Ruhlman touches on it, again and again, and then backs off.
Two tangents, and then I’ll lay this review to rest. First, on store organization and produce: Produce also needs to be near the refrigerated storerooms behind the walls. Not only do half the products need to stay moist and cool, much of the produce must be removed from the bins and shelves after the store closes and properly stored overnight, so the closer they are to the back storage coolers, the more convenient it is. This is why you will never find produce in the center of a store—it would be impractical. (145)
I’d actually love to see statistics for this. Ruhlman’s aim is to refute the claim that groceries put produce at the front of the store so that people feel like they’ve started off healthy and thus aren’t bothered by putting processed foods in their baskets later, but it’s pretty anecdotal, and I have some anecdotes of my own: my mother’s favourite independent grocery has produce in the centre of the store. It’s an upscale grocery, probably markedly smaller than the places Ruhlman discusses, and ‘centre store’ there is in fact within easy access of the back storage. The Wal-Mart, of all places, that is near my parents’, also has produce in the middle of the store…and that’s not a small place. Meanwhile, a number of the grocery stores near me in Germany have produce at the back of the store, or tucked away in a corner—just depending, I suppose, on where it made logistical sense. So I’m perfectly happy to believe that ‘produce needs to be near the refrigerated storerooms’—but I’d like a better argument than ‘you’ll never find it in the middle’ when…I can. And I have. And I currently can’t set foot in a grocery without evaluating where the produce is.
Lastly: Is this or is this not the most random, amusing flex you have seen in a while? I did see some monster bills when I was bagging—$100, even $500—and I myself have personally spent more than $1,000 during a single grocery store run when cooking for a large group over the course of a week at the Publix in Key West. I once filled four whole shopping carts, twice what my dad would buy in the 1960s to feed a family of three for a week. (245)
All in all, it’s well written and clearly a product of passion. Not really what I was hoping for, but then, do you really know what you’re getting into when you pick up a book about grocery stores?
I received a free copy of this book via a GR giveaway.
Ruhlman’s Grocery explores—you guessed it—a subset of the American grocery store. Ruhlman focuses on ‘small’ groceries, although his definition and mine (and perhaps yours) differ: he’s looking at size from an economic perspective, which is to say that the margins and profits are small even if the company is a chain with many stores spread across a large geographic area.
Groceries changed as food supply changed, and it’s that shift that Ruhlman tracks more than, say, the day-to-day work that goes into keeping a grocery running. He’s less interested in operations than discussing what we eat, and what we cook, and what we can’t be fussed with. Take broccoli: A child growing up in the early twentieth century probably didn’t know whether he or she liked broccoli, because it didn’t really exist in America. Thomas Jefferson is said to have brought seeds back from Italy, where it has grown for centuries, and planted them here in 1767. But American farmers didn’t start growing it until the 1920s. And major production didn’t begin until after World War II. Now we each eat on average nearly six pounds of it a year. (206)
(Not until the 1920s! But I’m also over here thinking, what? Only six pounds a year?)
Some of it I found markedly less interesting. I’ve read enough books that go into the benefit of whole foods, and the rise of process foods, that at this point I’m looking for something new if that’s what a book talks about, and I don’t think this really offers that newness. There’s a very long wander into nutrition and wellness, and it’s fine and all, but it’s not so much about groceries—it’s about telling people what’s good for them.
This is not a judgment on what you choose to eat. If you hunger for a cheese product grilled between bread that’s been stripped of its nutrition, along with a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup (made with tomato paste, corn syrup, and potassium chloride), fine. It was one of my favorite childhood meals. Just be aware. Buy fat-free half-and-half if that’s what you like, but know what it is you’re putting into your body (and your children’s bodies) and why. Because, and this is the judgment call, fat isn’t bad, stupid is bad. (103)
Take out the second parenthetical there, and I think you can get away with saying that quotation isn’t a judgement, but…but you’d have to take out the second parenthetical. There ends up being quite a lot of opinion in the book and what is and isn’t worth eating, and a deviation into whether or not meat is ethical, which…I don’t know. If even the writer admits that his arguments for eating meat are facile (191), maybe he…shouldn’t be making those arguments? I’m saying this as someone who has been vegetarian for almost the entirety of my life—I don’t know what meat tastes like—and also someone who knows there are more and less ethical ways to consume meat, and that people should make up their own damn minds. But I cannot read I believe existence is an end in itself, and if we didn’t raise pigs and chickens and cows for their meat, eggs, and milk, they would exist, if at all, only in the wild, a more cruel and unforgiving place than a farm or feedlot (191) and take it seriously. Is it really better for chickens to have short lives pressed together in an overcrowded production house than to have short lives out in the wild? (Animals did just fine in the wild before humans entered the picture.)
Okay. Rant over. Let’s get to the…meat…of the thing, or at least what could be the meat but wasn’t: impact of gender roles. Ruhlman touches on it, again and again, and then backs off.
This was the beginning of a cultural shift, the rise of the working woman, that would help transform our food supply and arguably the quality of the food we served our families. (12)
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But Balzer has noticed another major change in his lifetime. “We discovered that men can cook,” he said. And who was promoting this? “Every wife in America was telling her neighbors that nobody can barbecue like her husband. And for only one reason. Then and today, the number one person preparing the food is a woman. And she wants to do one thing, which the ages of humanity were trying to solve, and that is get out of it. So supermarkets come along and say, you know what? We’re going to start preparing food, because we are a food-service operation.
“The history of mankind always follows one path when it comes to eating,” Balzer concluded, “and it never deviates from that path. And that’s who’s going to do the cooking. The answer to that now is the same as it was since we began cooking: not me.”
Or to repeat his words to Pollan: not going to happen, because we’re cheap and lazy. (91)
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“Right now prepared foods account for 4 to 6 percent of our sales,” Carin told me. “In Chicago, that number is 8 percent. And I expect it will see double-digit growth, which is unheard of in any other department.”
“What accounts for the growth?” I asked.
“The driving force is women in the workforce and how much time people have,” she said. This seems intuitive, but her second reason for the growth was, to me, ominous. “Also, nobody knows how to cook anymore. It’s mind-boggling. Some women don’t even know how to hold a knife.”
“Interesting that you single out women,” I said. “Why is that?”
“Because, like it or not, women are still the ones who are mainly responsible for the meals at home.” (232)
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But what of the increasing number of prepared foods? It is surely a good thing, no? A range of nourishing, all-natural, good-for-you dishes that require no more preparation than a frozen dinner. Perfect for the busy dual-income family that has little time to devote to cooking. But it also means we have even less reason to cook. We have no need to share the work of preparing the food because someone else can do it for us. But with work comes a heightened appreciation of that work’s result, so when we bring home prepared food and heat it in the microwave or on the stovetop, there’s no one to thank or be grateful for, there’s no deeper appreciation of the food other than whether it tastes okay, and the house is without the relaxing aromas of food cooking. (251)
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Growing up in the 1970s I ate a lot of green beans, because that’s what Mom cooked while Dad was outside grilling the steaks. (253)I know it wasn’t the point of the book, but I ended up really wishing that Ruhlman had gone deeper into this rather than into what people should and shouldn’t be eating. Because…what I’m seeing is a suggestion that once women had more opportunities in the workforce, they put less time and effort into cooking, and men don’t want to do it either: that it’s a chore. And I’m left wondering: who does Ruhlman think should be responsible for cooking? Is the answer to learn to love it, or learn to get used to it? Why do we so often see cooking as a chore? It’s not a bad thing for anyone to spend a lot of time in the kitchen if cooking is something they enjoy, but it’s also not a bad thing for women to no longer feel pressure to spend so much time cooking for the family. But what then? Ruhlman’s stories from childhood suggest that his father did the shopping (because he enjoyed it) but his mother did the cooking (because it had to be done?), but I’d have liked more. Feels like a can of worms that is opened but not…I don’t know how to finish this analogy. Not fed to the fish?
Two tangents, and then I’ll lay this review to rest. First, on store organization and produce: Produce also needs to be near the refrigerated storerooms behind the walls. Not only do half the products need to stay moist and cool, much of the produce must be removed from the bins and shelves after the store closes and properly stored overnight, so the closer they are to the back storage coolers, the more convenient it is. This is why you will never find produce in the center of a store—it would be impractical. (145)
I’d actually love to see statistics for this. Ruhlman’s aim is to refute the claim that groceries put produce at the front of the store so that people feel like they’ve started off healthy and thus aren’t bothered by putting processed foods in their baskets later, but it’s pretty anecdotal, and I have some anecdotes of my own: my mother’s favourite independent grocery has produce in the centre of the store. It’s an upscale grocery, probably markedly smaller than the places Ruhlman discusses, and ‘centre store’ there is in fact within easy access of the back storage. The Wal-Mart, of all places, that is near my parents’, also has produce in the middle of the store…and that’s not a small place. Meanwhile, a number of the grocery stores near me in Germany have produce at the back of the store, or tucked away in a corner—just depending, I suppose, on where it made logistical sense. So I’m perfectly happy to believe that ‘produce needs to be near the refrigerated storerooms’—but I’d like a better argument than ‘you’ll never find it in the middle’ when…I can. And I have. And I currently can’t set foot in a grocery without evaluating where the produce is.
Lastly: Is this or is this not the most random, amusing flex you have seen in a while? I did see some monster bills when I was bagging—$100, even $500—and I myself have personally spent more than $1,000 during a single grocery store run when cooking for a large group over the course of a week at the Publix in Key West. I once filled four whole shopping carts, twice what my dad would buy in the 1960s to feed a family of three for a week. (245)
All in all, it’s well written and clearly a product of passion. Not really what I was hoping for, but then, do you really know what you’re getting into when you pick up a book about grocery stores?
I received a free copy of this book via a GR giveaway.