Introduction: Between the Ice and You

Let’s look beneath the ice-chipped surface of a fish counter at a Whole Foods in New York City. This happens every other month after closing. The customers leave, the checkout crew changes into street clothes, the store goes into lockdown to prevent its own employees from robbing them. Shifts change and the ceaseless shitty Hall & Oates music stops and is replaced by silence. Night workers, a motley rainbow of low English, low skill, low smile workers, come in, kneepads over long pants, to restock the shelves like a reverse midnight harvest. They stoop over, heads down, in their KIND bar tm shirts, or whatever other functional and empowering edible shelled out sponsorship money, kneeling there, glumly stacking yogurts. At the fish counter, the seafood team begins. Fish are removed, latex gloves gripping them two at time— fillets and whole fish, sloppy little bastards— and tossed into the plastic tubs that are their nightly home. The mussels are bagged, the shrimp scooped together into mesh cages. Next the metal trays come up. These are little more than decorative housing, and are promptly sprayed down to remove a day’s worth of sweat and oil and torn pieces of flesh that sloughed off from handling. Below the trays, a thin plastic webbing for grip, then a layer of ice: once individual chips, now grown hard as a skating rink from periodic thaws and reicings during the day. The surface is littered with the typical debris: fish parts, crumpled-up stickers announcing wild caught!, errant cockles, cracked mussels.

Usually that would be it. Aprons would be stripped off, giant foul garbage bags of fish guts and butcher paper would be lugged to the dumpsters in the back. But on this night, the one that comes every other month or so, the case itself is cleaned. An order has come down from high, seemingly at random. And so, for the entire length of the 38foot case, the employees hack the ice into large chunks. It is exactly like shoveling snow in the winter and they use big thick shovels to do the job. Standing up on metal platforms to get leverage, they chop straight down, chiseling out 2′ x 2′ x 2′ blocks that they then systematically take out like giant sugar cubes to be melted in the back. It is reasonably physical work and soon they are sweating. Once the top layer is removed, they begin anew on the layer below: gridding it out, chiseling, pulling out cubes. Beneath this second layer, the ice is more crunchy, less frozen. It’s an old freezer and inconsistent and it only takes a few scrapes before you get to streaks of brown. A few more and the smell comes. It is horrible and not at all of decomposition but of fecal waste maybe sweetened slightly, thick in the air like you are exhuming something dangerous, which perhaps you are. Soon after the smell, the streaks of brown darken and the ice turns with entrails and smashed pieces of shell, the shovel uncovering squid tentacles, crab antennae, all two months old, rotten, buried under there, each scrape revealing some new purple color, and the odor is such that you really cannot breathe it long. So neither team member does, instead spelling each other by rushing off to do other tasks like melting the giant cubes under hot water or just standing to the side and muttering how the fuck does it get like this?

Then, at a certain scrape of the shovel, the bottom of the case is revealed. Stainless steel. But it’s streaked green with bile, gray with pancreatic froth, pink with clam flesh, all strung out and mashed in the ice slurry. To the extent that they are recognizable, the contents are inexplicable and vaguely horrifying. No shrimp were stored in this section of the case, so why the rotting pile of shrimp casings? No whole fish either, so why the set of red lacy gills? Months of slow melting and cracks in the ice and the chaos of retail have allowed it all to accumulate down there in a weird gutter of seafood waste compressed beneath four and a half feet of ice.

Eventually the ice and slime are removed and a high- blast hose with a separate nozzle for green concentrated soap is sprayed against the stainless- steel bottom. The water is hot, so there is steam, your glasses fog up, and the rot slithers down the drain. The shells cluster in cracked bits and are removed by hand. Finally, now somewhere closer to one a.m., the case bottom looks clean, even gleaming, and the team goes back to the giant ice machine along the north wall to return with heaping shovels of virginal white snow. Clean ice, the cleanest you’ve ever seen after that, and they pile it in heaps into the case, building back the buffer between the wet semi- rot that will be the bottom of the case and a top retail surface downy and clean. When they are finished, the ice sparkles. No more skate rink, each chip separate and glittering in the light; the perfect platform to sell good fish. The smell, once choking, is not just muffled but nonexistent. A very real and solid barrier has been erected. And once the floor has been sprayed down and mopped across with a giant squeegee, the entire scene will feel like a dream. Tomorrow morning the fish will be laid down again in their metal trays, cut parsley and trills of red peppers arranged on top. And it won’t be unhygienic in the least. It will be undetectable and irrelevant. There will be a thick wall of ice separating the retail surface from the depths below. And in this way— he very real way the fish case at Whole Foods on the Bowery can be simultaneously appalling and perfectly hygienic and safe— t is a fitting metaphor for the grocery business as whole and a start to this book.

First, lest we get off on the wrong foot, a moment to state how underplayed that description of the opening smell was. Over the course of researching this book, I climbed aboard fishing boats littered with the debris of mashed fish and seaweed left for weeks at a time to roast in the sun. I necropsied chickens, pulling their guts apart looking for signs of disease as they radiated that lab-specific scent of ammonia and death. I snuck into industrial swine farms and chicken houses, wading through lagoons of feces in the process, and at one point, in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand, on a ninety- degree summer day, I stood ankle-deep in rotten trash fish on the loading dock, ten thousand minnows piled up in silver ribbons, left for days, as they waited to be transformed into the protein base of the aquaculture pyramid. Those were some strong sniffs. And yet none of it— not the trash fish nor fecal lagoons— was as fundamentally gross and disturbing as the smell that came out of that fish case in Manhattan. In a Whole Foods. In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the wealthiest nation in the world. Which is to say, melodrama has its place in life, but not in my descriptions of smells. Maybe that’s an odd note to start a book on, but this is nonfiction. Names have not been changed, except in the few places where I felt my writing might threaten a subject’s livelihood. Characters have not been combined. Quotes are either from audio recordings or written down in the moment. And descriptions of smells have not been exaggerated for effect.

This book is about the grocery store. About the people who work there and the routes of supply that define it. It is the product of five years of research, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of hours tracking down and working alongside the buyers, brokers, marketers, and managers whose lives and choices define our diet. The five years were a time of dramatic upheaval. Walmart seized organics. Amazon seized Whole Foods. The promise of automation loomed over trucking. Minimum wage laws shifted, giving employees the promise of a new salary floor. Yet, what I found, whether talking to Whole Foods executives about the Amazon deal or to new Amazon employees as they stocked shelves, was that during this upheaval the most primal drives in the industry weren’t so much disrupted as elevated and laid bare.

What emerged is a fascinating and largely hidden world. In 2018, Americans spent $701 billion at supermarket- style grocery stores, still our largest food expenditure by a wide margin; there are 38,000 of these stores across this land, and the average adult will spend 2 percent of their life inside one. They are the point of interface most familiar and least understood in our food system: bland to the point of invisibility, so routine they blur into background. And yet the grocery store exists as one of the only places where our daily decisions impact— make us complicit in— a system we have come in equal parts to scorn and see as savior. We’ve been happy to let more impersonal aspects of our food system— from industrialized slaughterhouses to farm bill subsidies— take up the lion’s share of investigation and critique. But to understand how and why our food gets to us in the form it does, the grocery store is a powerful entry point. It is not only the way that most of us are introduced to the system, tagging along with Mom as she shops, it is perhaps the best opportunity to understand the system on the terms of the people who operate it on our behalf.

And their operation is something to behold. Grocery stores— and the supply chain that has grown up around them— are shockingly efficient. We spend only 10 percent of our budget on food, compared to 40 percent by our great- grandparents in 1900, and 30 percent by our grandparents in the 1950s. It is a number that has been decreasing the entire century along with the rise of mass supply chains…