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Shelf World

I am engrossed in The Secret Life of Groceries at the moment. If I had the time I would read it end to end over a few days but real life does not allow for such luxury so it has been been reading with many starts and stops. Every chapter in the book has new things to teach me. 

It is a world we should know about being that everyone is a grocery store customer. In essence the book is about all of us - that secret life that Lorr talks about is lived to serve us. We in aggregate create demand for stuff like Slawsa. The whole system is being orchestrated with much pain and labor for us to get the food we want to eat. The process by which we get to that point makes food appear coincidental almost. 

It is just any other commodity being moved around to extract money out of the system. The soul gets dropped out very early on in the process. The staging of food where it finally meets the consumer - the author has a vivid description of the Wholefoods seafood counter - feels akin to a funeral to see the deceased one last time. That is just not true for seafood on ice but for every last thing in a grocery store. I am still not done reading the book but I doubt that feeling of dissociation from the which keeps us alive this book helped crystalize, will change. 

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