The Secret Life Of Groceries Quotes

What appears to be happening is that the industry has figured out not only how to make humans replaceable but also how to make money off their replacement. The labor shortage is profitable.

I had watched organics and fair trade explode into billion-dollar industries. But it was hard to say the world was becoming a better place for the marginal spending. In fact, it felt like it was becoming a more insulated one. I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.

By 1900, the shift is momentous: packaged food is responsible for one-fifth of all manufacturing in the United States. Modern life does not exist without this shift.

Along the way, there were minor tweaks. Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma City grocer, introduced the shopping cart in 1937.

Commodity is contempt all the way down, and wandering the ALDI distribution center I realize just how much materialism depends on individuality, on our ability to inject meaning into things.

I liked especially going to the little country grocery store in North Hampden to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons—a waste of time, I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

If anything, this is a conspiracy of good intentions, convincing ourselves in circles that we are doing just enough not to require any uncomfortable action, replacing the terror of a gargantuan world with a feeling of control.

The real object of our scorn might not be in our food safety standards, in the revolving-door regulators, in the rise of industry, or even in the abuse and commodification of men, but in ourselves as agents in this world: for knowing what we want and what we are willing to give up to get it, for understanding that this is a moral outrage we’ve been digging for all along because it verifies what we know but also don’t quite want to acknowledge about ourselves.

in 1890, Robert Gair of Brooklyn begins to manufacture precut, easy-to-fold boxes. The effect on the grocery store cannot be overstated: regular shipments of products suddenly make economic sense. Producer and retailer become connected in a far more consistent manner.

The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped writing on a grocery list She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea. But only possibly.

While her moment-to-moment experiences may have been torturous, Gladys was still able to complete tasks. For instance, she could show up for work on time, go grocery shopping, and remember to water the plants. Therefore, if someone’s life could be judged solely by her daily agenda, Gladys Baker would have appeared quite unspectacular. Yet it was how she experienced and reacted to the string of events that made her different.

All these individually wrapped products beget something even more precious to us. Choice. As synonym for control. In a world without boxes lit with insignias, colors, and slogans, there is little need for a consumer to touch anything. It’s all the same. But suddenly, with cardboard boxes flying off the factory line, the greedy tentacles of customer demand are excited; they head to the general store and request particular products.

Too often during these media storms, I’ve heard people say, let’s boycott this product,” Simon Baker, a migrant researcher, explains. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground. In my research, I’ve found this often means going into sex work . . . What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards.

Even though they were staring at each other across a busy street, the little old lady and the gang of adolescent skinheads might just as well have been nose to nose. They stared. No one blinked. No one backed down. This little old lady had never in her life backed down before mere adolescents. Her daughter had what was perhaps a better grasp of what was perhaps reality. “Mama,” she said as she shifted her bag of groceries to her other arm, “Come on. Let’s go. They’re skinheads. Probably up from Bircher country.

Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization.

I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill River. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 1950s) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons - a waste of time, I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

By the time Lillian had turned twelve ears old, cooking had become her family. It had taught her lessons usually imparted by parents- economy from a limp head of celery left too long in the hydrator, perseverance from the whipping of heavy cream, the power of memories from oregano, whose flavor only grew stronger as it dried. Her love of new ingredients had brought her to Abuelita, the owner of the local Mexican grocery store, who introduced her to avocados and cilantro, and taught her the magic of matching ingredients with personalities to change a person's mood or a life. But the day when twelve-year-old Lillian had handed her mother an apple- fresh-picked from the orchard down the road on an afternoon when Indian summer gave over to autumn- and Lillian's mother had finally looked up from the book she was reading, food achieved a status for Lillian that was almost mystical. "Look how you've grown," Lillian's mother had said, and life had started all over again. There was conversation at dinner, someone else's hand on the brush as it ran through her hair at night. A trip to New York, where they had discovered a secret fondue restaurant, hidden behind wooden shutters during the day, open by candlelight at night. Excursions to farmers' markets and bakeries and a shop that made its own cheese, stretching and pulling the mozzarella like taffy. Finally, Lillian felt like she was cooking for a mother who was paying attention, and she played in an open field of pearl couscous and Thai basil, paella and spanakopita and eggplant Parmesan.

By the time Lillian had turned twelve years old, cooking had become her family. It had taught her lessons usually imparted by parents- economy from a limp head of celery left too long in the hydrator, perseverance from the whipping of heavy cream, the power of memories from oregano, whose flavor only grew stronger as it dried. Her love of new ingredients had brought her to Abuelita, the owner of the local Mexican grocery store, who introduced her to avocados and cilantro, and taught her the magic of matching ingredients with personalities to change a person's mood or a life. But the day when twelve-year-old Lillian had handed her mother an apple- fresh-picked from the orchard down the road on an afternoon when Indian summer gave over to autumn- and Lillian's mother had finally looked up from the book she was reading, food achieved a status for Lillian that was almost mystical. "Look how you've grown," Lillian's mother had said, and life had started all over again. There was conversation at dinner, someone else's hand on the brush as it ran through her hair at night. A trip to New York, where they had discovered a secret fondue restaurant, hidden behind wooden shutters during the day, open by candlelight at night. Excursions to farmers' markets and bakeries and a shop that made its own cheese, stretching and pulling the mozzarella like taffy. Finally, Lillian felt like she was cooking for a mother who was paying attention, and she played in an open field of pearl couscous and Thai basil, paella and spanakopita and eggplant Parmesan.

So it is with insights: they exist in moments of cultural contrast,

His voice is about three octaves deeper than his thin frame has any reason to suggest. The effect is grandfatherly to the extreme. He uses phrases like “every simple bastard” and “a bunch of kooks” and laughs at his own jokes in a bona fide chuckle, which is to say, with an easy, self-amused, reflective roll, as if he’s astonished by a world so weird as to provide him this type of fodder. His eyes widen frequently but not theatrically. He leans in; he listens. He points out accepted industry-wide lies, calls his friends and competitors out on casual racism and sexism, and checks his own exaggerations immediately. He is the quintessential non–bullshit artist. And it is an art, this straight talk to the extreme. It is active and participatory and evoked from you, often despite you.

In 1932, only 2 percent of the people qualified to go to college actually went. In 1964 that number had jumped to 60 percent,” he tells me. This was change. The extreme growth in college enrollment was largely the work of the G.I. Bill of Rights, guaranteeing returning veterans—first from the Second World War, then Korea—a college education. And Joe realized the reason he kept coming back to the article was the wave hadn’t crested. The war in Vietnam meant the G.I. Bill was about to hit a third generation. “All these college graduates,” he says. “I just thought they might want something different to eat.

travel was another form of education.

In this sense, grocery is a story still being written. In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers. Then somewhere, after centuries, we woke to the fact that our tools had become too powerful—our monocultures, pesticides, and mine scalings—the tools just as fearsome as the nature they set out to rein in, and we found ourselves cowering once again. This is the typical end point, with our Frankensteins and atomic Godzillas. A daily alienation updated almost as a background app into our iPhone addictions and queasy feelings about social media we just can’t quit. But what we’ve begun to see, what I certainly learned writing this book, is that we’ve undertaken a new project. We decided that, caught between two awesome external forces—nature everlasting, and these new tools of our own creation—the one piece in the whole operation that was most malleable was us. Our selves. That we would happily trade away aspects of our lives—be it community or duty or eccentricity or care—for an ability to survive between them.

I hate fighting. I’m sensitive and, frankly, not good at it. If the consequence of bickering online means I’ve got to spend the afternoon feeling bad because a kid I don’t remember from high school called me a “fat-ass Kelly Price” over a Reductress article, please murder me. And if my tweets get on your goddamn nerves: BLOCK ME FIRST. Kill me with your powerful brain! There are too many places in real life where blocking is not a viable option to tolerate someone ruining your secret lives online. You can’t block the coworker who won’t stop fucking talking while loitering nearby as you’re just trying to put half-and-half in your breakroom coffee, but you can block that friend of a friend who says shit like, “I’m not prejudiced, I don’t care if a person is purple or green or blue.” LMAO, blue people???? SHUT THE FUCK UP. You can’t delete the neighbor whose eyesore of a car is parked halfway across your driveway and whose cat keeps shitting on your deck, but you can delete your cousin who earnestly believes that rap music is reverse racism and vehemently comments as much on every Kendrick Lamar video you share. There’s no mute button for the woman at the grocery store who won’t stop asking you where the shampoo is, even though you’re pushing your

Continuity is in the eye of the beholder. Commodity is a matter of perception. Coffee can be Folgers or it can be terroir: the regions where beans are grown span continents and microclimates, lumping them together under a single label is as silly as lumping together Ethiopia and Brazil, or jungle and mountains. To anyone who bothered to look, the idea of a unified commodity coffee called Folgers was an invention based on simplifying trade.

Trucking as an industry is gargantuan: 10.7 billion tons of freight per year get moved around this great land on trucks, which breaks down to 54 million tons a day, or 350 pounds per man, woman, and child. Per day. It is the most common form of employment in the majority of American states, with more than 12.6 million commercial drivers circulating our highways.

It turns out, however, that in trucking, along with the tire tread, brake pad, and transmission, the trucker himself is another one of those parts structurally designed to be worn to failure.

The truth for perishable grocery is closer to an NICU ward at the hospital: blazing technology furiously working to sustain premature life. The fruit and veg of our lives are alive and need to stay that way until we bite into them. Unlike the NICU, however, the distribution center has no interest in survivability per se. Instead all this technology serves to control. The teenage ambition to stop-start time, pause, and then unfreeze life at the perfect moment is steadily being achieved for many forms of produce.

Customers would enter single file, pick up a basket, shuffle through a turnstile, and then head down a winding one-way route that would guide them past every item in the store, anticipating the hell of today’s Ikea by about fifty years.

Let’s face it: we judge. We all do. It’s part of our humanity. We might never say anything aloud, but we judge, or at the least, we wish others would be different or act differently. Admit it: when you’re at the grocery store, are you secretly looking at someone else’s cart and thinking, Ooh, don’t you know diet soda will kill you? Gosh, that’s loaded with carbs. When you experience or observe behavior you don’t like, Pause and Think by asking yourself: Is this in my control? Is this any of my business? When it’s not your business and/or not in your control, you need to Act by practicing Flexibility.

This story is as common as dirt. Thousands of Native Americans in California, Arizona, and New Mexico could tell it. Anyone with a grandpa who was haunted by Indian boarding school, who stung his family like a dust devil when he drank. Anyone with a grandma who washed laundry until her fingernails cracked and bled, who went without eating when there weren’t enough groceries because she wanted her ten kids to have a few extra bites. Anyone with a mother who kept secrets so her kids wouldn’t find out about their father’s jailbird past. Anyone with a father who chose the violence of industrial labor over the violence of reservation life because he wanted his kids to get through private school and make better lives for themselves. So many people could tell this story, it is shocking how rarely it has been told. Too many mothers have watched their kids thrown into cop cars without protest. Too many aunties have put ice on black eyes without saying a word. Too many grandmothers have watched their grandchildren, their hope for the future, head out to a party and never come home. Too many girls have pretended nothing happened after experiencing sexual harassment, only to redirect the hate toward the innocent face staring back at them in the mirror.

This attitude — that the inner guru is enough — is often adopted by those whose intellectual orientation is slightly nihilistic or who are from very controlling, high- achieving families and resent the idea of yet another powerful person breathing down their necks. Then there are others who like to be led. Even when it comes to mundane issues, they don’t trust their own judgment or inner voice. They can barely go to the grocery store without being full of doubt. They also tend to be a little bit lazy, asking the guru for advice on every little thing that pops into their heads. These types of people have to learn to trust themselves and rely less on the outer guru. They might find that the more they trust the inner and secret gurus, the more they rely on and love the outer guru. Ultimately, the question of whether the inner guru is enough for you is irrelevant if your spiritual aim is to attain enlightenment. But there is an easy way to find the answer. If you can overcome any and all external circumstances, then maybe you don’t need the outer guru, because by then all appearance and experience arise as the guru anyway. On the other hand, if a practitioner is not able to control circumstances and situations, then all kinds of mind training are necessary. Therefore, one needs to be led, to be poked, to be spoon-fed. To find out whether or not you are controlled by circumstances and situations, there are myriad things you can do, such as skip lunch. If you are a man, wear a bra and walk around in public. If you are a woman, go to a fancy party in your bedroom slippers. If you are married, see if you can tolerate someone pinching your spouse’s bottom. See if you are swayed by praise, criticism, being ignored, or being showered with attention. If you get agitated, embarrassed, or infuriated, then more than likely you are still under the spell of the conditions of habit and culture. You are still a victim of causes and conditions. When a loved one dies or the life you are trying to build collapses, it’s likely that your understanding of the inner and secret gurus will not ease the pain. Nor will your understanding of “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” provide solace. In this case, you need to insert a new cause to counter these conditions. Because your understanding of the inner and secret gurus is only intellectual, you cannot call upon them. This is where the outer, physical, reachable guru is necessary. As long as you dwell in a realm where externally existing friends and lovers are necessary, as long as you are bothered by externally existing obstacles like passions and moral judgments, you need a guru. Basically, as long as you have a dualistic mind, don’t kid yourself by thinking that an inner guru is enough. When you reach a point where you can actually communicate with your inner guru, you will have little or no more dualism. You will no longer be repelled by or attracted to an outer guru. Therefore, the outer guru is necessary until you at least have the gist of the inner and secret gurus. When you realize the inner and secret gurus, you won’t even be able to find the outer guru anymore.

In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers.

ultimately it should upend our perception of grocery to remember it isn’t about food, it never has been about food—food is the business of eating—grocery, we’ll see, that’s completely different; it’s the business of desire.

Our society is awash with founders, all listening to the same leadership podcasts, doing the same kettlebell lunges to improve grip and leg strength at the same time, then dissolving identical Tim Ferriss–approved muscle-building complexes into their post-workout shakes to transform their previously similar mesomorph bodies into something even more metabolically equivalent. All while making parallel grandiose-style projections about their own app, disruption, or innovation whereby their personal self-interest miraculously aligns with the interest of society writ large and places them as CEO/founder/servant-leader on the very prow of the vessel of civilization. It is lunacy.

You’ll never know their names. You’ll never recognize their faces as a life that you helped to save. But after tonight, you might walk the streets of Seattle and wonder whether the woman behind you in line at the coffee shop is one of them. Or maybe it will be the person at the grocery store in front of you that is trying to count exact change just to avoid using a credit card. These Nameless Women are all around us, even if they haven’t been able to change their names. I am one of them.

In rapid succession, he banned all outside salesmen from the store as distraction and then drastically cut back his offerings.

When Joe made up his mind to sell, it happened very quickly. The final deal was a one-page contract and a handshake. The Albrechts were to “neither put a penny in, nor take a penny out.” Joe would stay on as CEO. No changes would be made to the way TJ’s was run. But Joe, the benign dictator, man of ten thousand ideas, was not capable of being someone else’s employee

Trucking as an industry is gargantuan: 10.7 billion tons of freight per year get moved around this great land on trucks, which breaks down to 54 million tons a day, or 350 pounds per man, woman, and child.

I come to see the trucking industry as structurally vampiric. I don’t say this to be dramatic. It is an industry that creeps along the margins of society and seduces the vulnerable, feeding itself on their aspirations, coaxing them to lend a little bit of their lives and credit in exchange for a promise that is almost never delivered: a stable job and control over their own destiny. Debt is the financial instrument that best expresses hope. Industrial trucking is brilliant at this precise exchange.

To put this in perspective, over the last ten years industry turnover in trucking has ranged between 95 to 112 percent. Which is, upon reflection, a range of percentages that barely makes sense. The turnover at a top law firm is 17 percent and that has been deemed a crisis for the profession. The turnover at Starbucks is around 65 percent. One hundred percent turnover in the trucking industry means that every single member of a fleet either retired or quit or was fired and was successfully replaced that year. One hundred twelve percent turnover for a given fleet means that cycle repeated more than once.

The structures that allow carriers to pressure drivers into team are essentially the same as the structures that keep drivers trapped across the system. “This is not far from sharecropping,” Desiree says. “It’s debt bondage. It’s sharecropping where instead of the field they are tenants on wheels.

It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation. The most satisfied truckers I meet are the ones who have explicitly recognized and chosen that trade-off.

We aren’t at a food conference. This is the hive mind of my condiment drawer, a gibbering id of anxiety and acquisition, responsible for all those decaying bottles in my fridge. The act of “doing” the Fancy Food Show is a little like a yuppie Halloween.

Then suddenly, “Health is wealth!” he exclaims, to my relief. “Health for the planet, wealth for the store!

The next day we return and do it all again. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow except to say, by hour 5.5 on day 2, I look up to see we are at slide 27 of 145 of the PowerPoint and I want to cry.

it doesn’t take long to realize that more than anything we are maintaining a mortuary here at the fish counter—keeping all our skinned dead friends looking glam for the customer.

A process that continues every day for the two months that I work there.

people, in general, are hideous and

diversity of human whim often allows it to do double duty, serving one through the act of serving another.

One manager repeatedly tells us, “We live in Yes town,” which he always clarifies by saying, “That means we never say no,” in a way that makes him sound like even more of an imbecile than it makes us feel.

But for the overwhelming number of people I talked with, being asked to smile and be nice to people didn’t come close to tops in terms of a grievance.

Something that makes us feel we should be oppressing someone to make it all make sense. And, of course, that something is real. Actually there are many somethings.

My experience is that there is an abundance of labor. I went to three different Whole Foods hiring sessions, and each one was packed with hopeful applicants. But that does not translate into an abundance of Walters. Unfortunately for WFs, they don’t seem to care about the distinction.

Lawrence is wrong and Andy is out. Whole Foods has let him go. They are working on a new, more efficient way of training employees, and his position has been “restructured.” And so the single most enthusiastic person, the truest true believer I met in my time in retail, the guy whose answer to everything was just work harder and trust that things will work out, has found out exactly whom to trust, exactly how hard things can work out.

I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update.

2020, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ food audits are but a multimillion-dollar drop in the $50 billion-per-year bucket that is the for-profit auditing industry.

In Saunders’s vision, the grocery store could become an even more fully realized version of this setup.

For the first time, customers can use all this conscious sifting as a vessel for meaning:

By 1965, every grocery store was a supermarket. Michael Cullen found the essential formula, the only issue left was to see how far you could push it.

At the 1956 International Food Congress in Rome—one year before Joe Coulombe would open Pronto Markets—the USDA set up an “American Way exhibit.” It featured the first fully stocked supermarket outside of the United States.

This was not media hype. Pope Pius XII himself weighed in, announcing his blessing from the Holy See. A few year later, when Khrushchev toured Washington, D.C., in 1959, the supermarket brought a temporary détente to the Cold War. As the Soviet premier scanned the store, he erupted with spontaneous praise: “I want to greet the manager of this supermarket. I am truly filled with admiration over what I see.

What Joe did—was one of the first to do, if not the first—was to create a store that provides products that reflect an identity, that exist in opposition to some generally homogenized mainstream. In the process, by necessity, he commodified individuality itself. He learned to sell you you. If you were the precise you he was after.

During this time, Joe makes two decisions that puts Pronto at odds with both 7-Eleven and the rest of the grocery world. First, he springs for good help.

he becomes obsessed with products that have a high value relative to size. “Joe would measure every product with a ruler and calculate price per cubic inch,

Certified was everything,” an employee of that store tells me. And not just for Joe but for all grocers.

In 1932, only 2 percent of the people qualified to go to college actually went. In 1964 that number had jumped to 60 percent,” he tells me. This was change. The extreme growth in college enrollment was largely the work of the G.I. Bill of Rights, guaranteeing returning veterans—first from the Second World War, then Korea—a college education. And Joe realized the reason he kept coming back to the article was the wave hadn’t crested. The war in Vietnam meant the G.I. Bill was about to hit a third generation.

Better educated, not more intelligent,” Joe grunts. “They weren’t any smarter, but college gave them a different vocabulary.” And he decided he was going to give them a chance to flex it while they shopped.

Air travel was uncomfortable, arduous, and for the elite. And then, in a blink, it wasn’t.

It also had the benefit of being extremely cheap. Discarded marine artifacts were in abundant supply and Joe could go down to the salvage yards near the harbor and pick up the flotsam for pennies per pound. And so the first store was “a riot of marine artifacts including a ship’s bell, oars, netting, and half a row boat.

The Victorian sketches that have come to define Trader Joe’s merchandizing were cost control: books published before 1906 were pre-copyright and so free for Joe to repurpose with a funny caption. He spent hours cutting them out himself at his home easel.

But when green friend after green friend began begging him to try to eat more consciously, he sensed a business opportunity.

But the biggest thing Joe discovered as he peered into the supply chains of health foods was that he had been right. Almost every product in the grocery store could be sold like wine. Continuity is in the eye of the beholder. Commodity is a matter of perception.

The holy grail of American taste seems to be the type of person whose individual taste is both an expression of them as an individual and one that is socially approved - two ideas that are by definition in tension - and thus taste and consumption itself is bound up in a paradox of sorts. Freedom to express the unique self but requiring approval from the greater conforming community, which itself is tied up in an even greater paradox: We believe we are individuals with an essence, that does not depend on material objects, but if that essence or sense of individuality is ever going to mean anything, if it's ever going to be demonstrated to our social group, then possessions and material objects are one of the few effective means of showcasing it.

The heuristic driving this tightening was outstanding. “Outstanding” meant something very particular to Joe. It meant a product that was the lowest price in town by a clear, consistent margin.

So it is with wariness that I bring up the cliché about business being a creative act. But, hey, that’s what Joe made me see.

In trafficking, the media focuses on why and where poor people get into difficult situations. But maybe we should be looking at why they are poor to begin with?

Living is about seeing past the challenges and not letting fear or false guilt be the decider for your life. Listen to the passions in your heart that your Creator put there. Maybe it's to stay. Maybe it's to go. Just listen for once instead of coming up with a list of reasons why you can't.

People are skittish and insane when it comes to their food. They not only want, they demand, through buying power, completely impossible, unsustainable opposites—low price and high quality, immediate availability and customized differentiation—and then react apoplectically to the often ingenious, if Frankensteinian, solutions industrial food creates to bridge the gap.

I don't think you'll ever find that 'full life' you've been craving until you accept the life you have. Mistakes. Heartache. Grief. All of it. Then you've got to decide if you're ready to let God have these burdens you've heaped upon your own shoulders, or if you'll keep on carrying that pain and regret, miserable under the weight of it.

Retail grocery is a reflection. What people call the supply chain is a long, interconnected network of human beings working on other humans’ behalf. It responds to our actions, not our pieties;

It [trucking] is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation” (p. 111)

Who doesn’t love butter on bread or cream in a salad dressing? These ingredients add luxurious mouthfeel and flavor. The problem is that those additions are loaded with saturated fat—the worst kind. But never fear: We’ve got a really cheap gourmet hack that cuts the fat and adds a ton of flavor. The secret is something we like to call vegetable crema or cream—basically, pureed vegetables. Dr. C got the idea recently when he was perusing the olive oil section of his local grocery store. There, among the golden and green liquids, was a very small but very expensive jar labeled crema di carciofi (artichoke cream). Dr. C loves artichokes, which are not only delicious but also loaded with inulin, a prebiotic fiber that feeds good gut bacteria. A quick look at the ingredient list revealed there wasn’t much to this interesting treat: just artichokes, lemon juice, garlic, and a little olive oil. So, Dr. C decided to make it himself. He picked up a few cans of artichoke hearts, packed in acidulated water. When he got home, he threw them in a high-speed blender with some garlic and extra-virgin olive oil and let it whirl. He gradually added olive oil until the mixture was creamy and totally smooth. Then he tasted it: It was absolutely amazing. And he had a huge jar of it for just a few bucks! Artichokes aren’t the only foundation for vegetable cream; you can use the same method to create other variations with steamed carrots, roasted onions, and more. Want something really fast? Just blend some avocado with lemon or lime (no oil needed). The cremas are great on a piece of 100 percent whole grain bread or paired with some smoked salmon (just as good as cream cheese!). You can also add to hot soups, in place of crème fraîche or sour cream, to add extra body, or as salad dressing with its creamy texture.

Many years later, serving time in a special detention center after yet another arrest, I sat in my cell reading a collection of newly published materials from the archives. These were secret reports by the KGB branch of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proudly documenting an extraordinary operation involving a journalist from Newsweek who had visited Ukraine sometime after the accident. Some twenty or so individuals had been involved in this operation, including members of special militia units and retired KGB agents. The KGB arranged it so that everybody the journalist interviewed was an intelligence officer, and all of them assured him the consequences of the accident were minimal and that the public was impressed and delighted by the efficient way the party and government had dealt with it. Vast resources had been brought to bear to deceive a single reporter because it was the appropriate thing to do. We could hardly allow enemy journalists to slander the Soviet reality by twisting the facts. Therefore, we would rather twist the facts a little ourselves. None of these tricks were any more effective than the infamous grocery stores in North Korea in which plastic produce is strategically placed so foreigners being driven from the airport can see that bananas and oranges are freely available. For years now the foreigners have been merrily snapping photos of these stores as a tourist sight. Hey, look over there! The famous fake fruit! Paradoxically, people in Washington, London, and Berlin knew more about what was really happening than those living in the contaminated zones. Our family did not know the whole truth, but we knew a whole lot more than most: when the party and government robustly denied the "contemptible insinuations of Washington's propaganda" about an explosion in Chernobyl, our relatives phoned and told us everyone in the region was aware there had been an explosion at the power station and that there were soldiers all over the place. Then the nightmare began. Soon, everybody within thirty kilometers of the power plant was being evacuated, and no matter how glowingly state television reported a well-coordinated operation, we already knew better. Our numerous relatives had been dispersed all over Ukraine, to wherever empty accommodations, like Pioneer camps, could be found. People were in despair. It was unbearable to be forced to abandon your farmstead, a home you had built with your own hands, especially since these people could be considered well-off by Soviet standards. We were the poor relatives compared to them, even though my father was in the army, which meant his pay was above average. We were just living a standard Soviet life in a military unit, with an apartment and a salary, while they, with their orchards and cows and private plots of land, were better provided for, at least in terms of food. Now they were leading their children to a bus and being driven away permanently to who knows where with only their identification papers and a minimal set of clothes. There were cows mooing and dogs barking, just like in films about the war. A couple of days later soldiers went around the villages shooting the dogs. A starving cow will just die, but dogs go feral, form packs, and might attack the few remaining people. What a monstrous shambles it all was, and it could not be concealed...A total of 116,000 people were evacuated. They needed new housing, new jobs, and compensation for the property they had abandoned. Even for a rich, developed country that would be a big ask. For the U.S.S.R., with its planned economy, it was a nightmare. New homes were needed; new cars were needed.

Here is another secret no one tells you: that je ne sais quoi comes from inner peace. It is having inner peace while you are drying the pots and pans. It is having inner peace while you choose your outfit for the day or while you walk the dog. It is having inner peace when you are in the midst of a difficult conversation, meeting a deadline in the office, lugging the groceries up the stairs, or even sitting in traffic at five p.m. Chic people have that je ne sais quoi, and that “certain something” is inner peace.