ALSO BY MICHAEL RUHLMAN
NONFICTION
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen
The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity
The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection
The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America
COOKBOOKS
Ruhlman’s How to Sauté: Foolproof Techniques and Recipes for the Home Cook
Ruhlman’s How to Braise: Foolproof Techniques and Recipes for the Home Cook
Ruhlman’s How to Roast: Foolproof Techniques and Recipes for the Home Cook
Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient
The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song to a Forgotten Fat
Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto
Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing (with Brian Polcyn)
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing (with Brian Polcyn)
Bouchon Bakery (with Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel) Ad Hoc at Home (with Thomas Keller)
Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide (with Thomas Keller)
Bouchon (with Thomas Keller)
The French Laundry Cookbook (with Thomas Keller)
A Return to Cooking (with Eric Ripert)
Michael Symon’s Live to Cook (with Michael Symon)
Copyright © 2017 Michael Ruhlman
Cover design by John Gall
Published in 2017 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941983
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2386-5
eISBN: 978-1-61312-999-9
The materials included in this book are intended only for informational purposes. Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is accurate and up to date, but neither publisher nor author accept any legal responsibility for any errors, omissions, or misleading statements contained herein. In addition, the trademarks that may appear in this book are the intellectual property of their respective owners and the usage herein does not constitute an endorsement.
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For Miss Scarlett
And in memory of fathers we’ve lost
“I think it could plausibly be argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. . . . Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners.”
—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.”
—M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
“The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.”
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Introduction: The Invisible Behemoth on Main Street
PART I: HOW WE GOT HERE
1. My Father’s Grocery Store Jones
2. How the A&P Changed the Western World
3. Growing Up
4. The Visionary Cleveland Grocer and the One-Stop Shop
5. “Nea, I Think I Want to Move to Cleveland—I Think I Want to Work for These Grocers”
6. How to Save a Locomotive That Has Jumped the Rails
PART II: HOW TO THINK ABOUT FOOD
7. She Bought the Fat-Free Half-and-Half
8. Breakfast: The Most Dangerous Meal of the Day
9. No Food Is Healthy
10. Shopping with My Doctor
11. The Nefarious Practices of the Modern-Day Grocer
INTERLUDE: CHECKOUT
PART III: THE CENTER AISLES
12. A Few of the Twenty Thousand New Products for Your Consideration
13. Better Living through Organic Turmeric, Ashwagandha Extract, and Hemp Seed Milk
14. A Walk in the Medicine Cabinet
PART IV: THE PERIMETER
15. The Farmer Who Can’t Find His Animals
16. Thirty-Two Thousand Pounds of Carrots, Every Week
17. “Nobody Knows How to Cook—It’s Mind-Boggling”
18. The Cooking Animal
19. Frozen
PART V: WHERE WE ARE HEADED
20. America’s Culinary Heritage
21. The Cleveland Trust
22. Cathedral
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Footnotes
Index of Searchable Terms
About the Author
Grocery stores are where we purchase most of our food—$650 billion annually at thirty-eight thousand of them in America, $1 trillion if you count all retail food sales1—yet most people know almost nothing about how they operate or where the food they sell comes from. We do, however, count on their always being here. While food issues drive some of the most compelling stories in the news (after national and international crises)—everything from the gluten-free fad, the pros and cons of genetically modified foods, questions about food’s possible impact on increasing gastrointestinal illnesses, food fanaticism, food recalls, anxiety about food expiration dates, eating disorders, the paleo diet, our $1 billion-per-day health care crisis—we remain more confused than ever by conflicting information we receive about the food we eat.
Some of this confusion can be explored and clarified by looking inside a grocery store.
The American supermarket is like no other retail store, and we use it like no other retail store, venturing out to buy groceries on average twice a week, every week, all year long, to feed ourselves. A family’s biggest expense, after housing and transportation, is groceries (about 10 percent of its income). A small portion of the population grows some of their own food, but almost no one, or no family, fails to go to a grocery store each week. It’s the only store most Americans have to spend money in. Those who can’t get to one tend to be sicker than those who can, according to researchers who study urban and rural food deserts, places where there are no convenient grocery stores.
Grocery stores are more than just places to buy food. They are in a broader sense a reflection of our culture. During the Cold War, for instance, supermarkets were a powerful symbol. “With their dizzying array of processed foods, [supermarkets] came to be regarded as quintessential symbols of the triumph of American capitalism,” writes Harvey Levenstein in Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. During the impromptu 1959 Kitchen Debate in Moscow, then vice president Richard Nixon pointed to the astonishing variety of goods available to Americans as evidence of capitalism’s superiority, pooh-poohed by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The next year, however, when Khrushchev and his pals visited a San Francisco supermarket, “the expression on their faces was something to behold,” writes Levenstein, quoting Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the hosts.
Because they are a reflection, even symbol, of our culture, and thus a gauge of who we are, supermarkets illuminate what we care about, what we fear, what we desire. They offer a view of our demographic makeup, including how much money we have and how big the country is, not to mention how much it is changing. The grocery store describes the effects of global warming on farms from Washington down through California, the state of our oceans, and the health of our land. It is a showcase for the latest food production innovations, which is critical given the world’s escalating population. And the grocery store is at the center of broader issues of how the food we eat affects our bodies and our body politic.
All these issues, and countless others, come into focus when viewed through the American supermarket, food’s last stop before it enters our homes. Though we aren’t often reflective or thoughtful about grocery stores, they are in truth a barometer of our country’s collective state of mind. Yet relatively little has been written about them, how they work, and what they mean.
Why this lack of attention? Perhaps because on the surface, grocery stores seem banal. Perhaps because they are so ubiquitous. I don’t know. There’s a scene in the extraordinary film The Hurt Locker, in which an American serviceman, a bomb diffuser, is home after a tour in Afghanistan, and is grocery shopping with his wife and young child. The fluorescent lighting in the supermarket aisles makes even the brightly colored boxes and packaging seem flat; we sense that the character, played by Jeremy Renner, will not be able to exist in this colorful but dead consumer landscape—a landscape embodied by the grocery store. Sure enough, he is soon back in Afghanistan, suiting up to dismantle a car bomb.
We tend to use grocery stores without thinking about them, or if we do think about them, it’s with mild annoyance, the thought of shopping itself a chore. What we rarely reflect on is what a luxury it is to be able to buy an extraordinary variety and quantity of food whenever we want every day of the year.
I’m often asked about the reason for our country’s growing obsession with food—the emergence of “the foodie,” the 1993 creation of a twenty-four-hour TV channel devoted to food, chefs becoming celebrities, new cooking appliance fetishes, and ever-fancier kitchens that see less and less actual cooking. My response is that when something you need to survive starts making you confused and sick, you become obsessive about it. We don’t tend to think much about air, but if we suddenly didn’t have any, it would be pretty much all we’d be able to think about. The same might be said about grocery stores—if they suddenly vanished, if our only option for sustenance was the Cheesecake Factory or a CVS pharmacy, we’d think about them a lot.
Part of the reason we don’t think about them is that food, on a daily basis, isn’t a concern in this country. We have a lot of food—more than what we need, in fact. It’s available every hour of every day. Just walk into any supermarket in America, an industry that responds aggressively to what America wants to buy, and you enter a landscape composed of tens of thousands of square feet of inexpensive food, food that’s critical first to our comfort and ultimately to our health and happiness. And yet there’s something wrong here, and we know it, though we can’t we quite get at what it is.
Here’s what this book is not: It is not a history of grocery stores, though their transformation from trading posts to country stores to stores selling packaged food to everything-under-one-roof supermarkets is part of the story. It’s not an aisle-by-aisle tour of each of the ten main departments of a grocery store (produce, grocery, seafood, meat, floral, bakery, frozen/dairy, deli, prepared foods, wine and beer). Nor do I report on the industrial system we’ve developed to feed our hunger for beef and pork, the methods and impact of overfishing our oceans, or even the ways the major food manufacturing companies (Kraft, Kellogg, PepsiCo, Nestlé, etc.) create, market, and profit from the food that seems to be making us sick. And this is not a nutritional guide to what is on the shelves and how it affects our health, though food choices and health are central to my story. These issues have been widely covered in other books and in the media.2
This book is instead what I would call a reported reflection on the grocery store in America, and an expression of my own love, anger, opinions, and concerns over what is in them, how it got there, and what it all means. I’ve been writing about food and cooking since 1996, when I snuck into the Culinary Institute of America to write about what the most prominent cooking school said you had to know in order to be a chef. In the intervening two decades, food issues have become some of the most pressing and confusing of our time. Because these issues are so numerous and disparate, I’ve had to be selective about what I choose to write about, and about these subjects I do not attempt to conceal my opinions.
I cover the food that interests me, the people who are most outspoken in the grocery business, and follow the stories that matter to me, whether it’s on a vast ranch in a national park in Idaho or on a tour of the grocery store with my physician. In researching this book, I visited farms, stores, and produce auctions; I joined grocers at food shows and interviewed the cheese makers they buy from; I toured a fish auction in Honolulu, one of the major fish auctions in the country; I bagged groceries, got to know the people who ran the stores and who worked in them, and generally hung out in the supermarket. In short, as a lover of food, a cook, and a person who cares about the future of food in America, I wrote a book that, using a small family grocery chain in my hometown of Cleveland as my inroad, is the book that I wanted most to read. Ultimately it is a story that’s never been written: an appreciation of, and wonder at, the American grocery store and the complex and fascinating business of retailing food to a country of 320 million people.
But it is also, as you’ll see, a deeply personal subject, and I try to tell that story as well. Happily, I grew up in a household that loved food and cooking, the place where, surely, my love of food and my fascination with grocery stores began. Having written about the food world for twenty years now, I’ve come to care about food more than I ever thought possible—about how we grow it, raise it, catch it, kill it, package it, distribute it, buy it, cook it, and dispose of what we don’t want. Our food (and the cooking of it, or lack thereof) is more important than most people realize, and we fail to understand this at our peril.
Rip Ruhlman loved to eat, almost more than anything else. We’d be tucking in to the evening’s meal when he’d ask, with excitement in his eyes, “What should we have for dinner tomorrow?” Used to drive Mom crazy. And because he loved to eat, my father loved grocery stores.
In my youth, two grocery stores operated less than a mile in either direction from our house in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland: Heinen’s on Chagrin Boulevard and Fazio’s on Van Aken Boulevard. Both were family-owned, open six days a week. Union laws forced them to close on weekdays at six p.m., the time my father stepped off the train from work, so Saturdays were the only time he could satisfy his grocery store jones. Mom went back to work once I started kindergarten, and I don’t recall her ever setting foot in a grocery store through the rest of their twenty-two-year marriage.3 That was my father’s territory. And to my father, grocery stores were the land of opportunity.
Look at all this food! All the flavors! All the frozen appetizers! Such opportunity for pleasure! So many new items to try! Kiwi! What’s that? The snack aisle! Diet Pepsi! Orange Crush!
A whole range of processed food appeared in the early 1960s, just as my parents started their marriage and had me, their only child, and items such as these were always on his list: Space Food Sticks, Cap’n Crunch, Tang (a synthetic form of orange juice), and Carnation Instant Breakfast. Milk and eggs, of course. Always pretzel rods for the jar in the den by the television set, which had knobs for changing the channel and adjusting the volume. Nuts, how he loved peanuts! An endless supply at the grocery store. Along the back aisle, the meat cases, oh Lord, the opportunities for ecstasy: veal and sausages and pork! Rack of lamb! And of course the beautifully marbled rib steaks (his favorite cut). The white button mushrooms in produce that he could sauté in butter and slather on top of that steak, which he’d lovingly grilled over charcoal (bought at the grocery store), which was lit with lighter fluid (bought at the grocery store), and into which he nestled Vidalia onions (grown as early as the 1930s, but new in Cleveland grocery stores in the 1970s) wrapped in foil with a pat of butter, and which would become charred and tender and sweet after an hour in the coals. Steak and a baked potato with a Vidalia onion was a beloved staple dinner of my youth. And always a salad. Heads of iceberg lettuce (this and a few sturdier greens were about the only salad options available through the long winters) were stacked into pyramids in the produce department. Five or six different bottled dressings were available to pour on that lettuce (back then, our choice was Wish-Bone Italian).
He bought pounds of Granny Smith apples, one of about five varieties to choose from, which were a part of his apple-a-day, broom-of-the-system regimen. He would proudly eat the entire apple, seeds and all. (When I tried to do the same, my babysitter told me that a tree would start growing in my stomach. What a scary but thrilling idea!) And carrots, bags and bags of carrots all year long. He loved carrots so much he ate them throughout the day. Dad routinely reached inside his suit jacket, mid-conversation in the hallway of the ad agency where he had become creative director, took a bite of a carrot, and returned it to his jacket pocket. To the bewilderment of new hires at the agency.
He would gladly deposit a few Rock Cornish game hens (a new offering, bred by Donald Tyson in 1965) into the metal shopping cart, with its one wobbly wheel, and eventually a box of Uncle Ben’s wild rice for my mother, who loved to roast the hens stuffed with it. If he and Mom were entertaining, he’d also grab a package of the mysteriously named “chipped beef,” a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and a bottle of “cooking sherry” for my mom’s “party chicken” recipe. (Combine all in a casserole dish, more or less, and bake till the chicken is rock solid; serve with boxed wine or a Gallo “Chablis.” The party-chicken dinner would be followed, long into the laughter-filled Saturday night, by Rusty Nails and Stingers and cigarettes in the living room, a fire crackling on the hearth.)
And the holidays—grocery shopping times ten! Dad stuffed the cart with giant Hershey chocolate bars and cartons of Whoppers to fill my Christmas stocking. He ordered from the supermarket the turkey for Thanksgiving and the rib roast for Christmas (but not the green beans, Campbell’s soup, and canned onion rings for the traditional green bean casserole, which was the domain of Aunt Barbara, who shopped at the Heinen’s on Green Road). At Easter he picked up a leg of lamb, butterflied by the helpful butcher, and garlic he would sliver and stud the lamb with, and black pepper and dried rosemary for seasoning. I would not see or even recognize the existence of a fresh herb until I was an adult living in New York City. Before then, if a recipe called for an herb other than curly parsley,4 it meant opening a small jar, usually containing something once green but now grayish, and held in a wall-mounted rack (a 1962 wedding gift to my parents, every jar but the tarragon untouched since the rack was mounted).
The tarragon—that was well used, for the béarnaise sauce to spoon over the filet mignon that Dad had wrapped in bacon and grilled. Béarnaise sauce—Mom’s purview, composed mainly of butter whipped into egg yolks, flavored with minced shallot and dried tarragon—was my family’s version of holy water. 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. The sauce was seasoned with tarragon vinegar, which for all we knew was distilled from the tarragon plant itself or simply dispensed from metal kegs that had arrived from the tarragon vinegar factory somewhere outside Oakland. In other words, we had no idea at the time how or where vinegar was made or what it was. In those days, we had little inkling how most of our basic pantry items were created. None of us could have explained that vinegar was fermented from alcohol or that the quality of that vinegar was directly related to the quality of the alcohol. All we knew for certain was that tarragon vinegar came from the shelf of a grocery store.
The butter that went into that béarnaise sauce must be mentioned. Oh, how Dad loved butter—as much as he wanted awaited him on the supermarket dairy shelf. Any conduit for its entry into his mouth sufficed: boiled artichokes, snails, lobster, bread, it didn’t matter. The man felt a kind of ecstasy when ounces and ounces sluiced down his gullet, nutritionists be damned. At the time, butter was considered bad for you. As were eggs. In the 1960s and 1970s, nutritionists, and in 1977 the US government, warned us that all fat was bad for you (thus the popularity of margarine and the creation of dubious concoctions such as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!).5 And eggs, regarded for thousands of years as a nutritious staple of the human diet, were determined to be heart attacks in a shell, the evidence of human history notwithstanding.
But my father wasn’t going to let a nutritionist or a magazine article tell him he couldn’t have eggs. “Malarkey,” he would say. Dad was the one who showed me how to make a broken-yolk fried-egg sandwich basted with butter and eaten on Wonder Bread generously smeared with Hellmann’s mayonnaise and served with a glass of milk. All available thanks to the grocery store—and only the grocery store at that time—one long block from our house in either direction. You couldn’t buy this stuff anywhere else. “We’re out of butter? I’ll run to the grocery store and get another pound,” he’d announce. “And another dozen eggs.” It almost seemed he loved to have forgotten an item on his long lists—another excuse to be in the grocery store.
Chicken legs were a go-to staple of weeknight dinners—chicken had become increasingly prevalent in the 1970s, though it wouldn’t overtake beef as America’s preferred protein until about 2012—baked with honey and orange juice, served with frozen green beans thawed on the stovetop and a box of Minute Rice (the par-cooked invention of the 1940s).
The grocers’ union mandate that Cleveland supermarket hours must end at six p.m. on weekday nights prevented working families from food shopping Monday through Friday. (Mom had become a buyer for Higbee’s department store on Euclid Avenue and thus was something of an outcast among married women in our provincial suburb, so she couldn’t shop during the week when most married women shopped. 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.) Hunter-gathering by necessity happened on Saturdays in Cleveland. So, in the 1960s and ’70s, Saturdays at the grocery store meant lines and lines of shoppers, their carts overflowing, clogging the aisles all the way to the meat department at the back of the store. As a boy, I would join Dad and ride in the cart till it became too full and then push the second cartful when the first overflowed with the week’s food. And then we’d load up the car—an invention that proved to be critical to the growth of the supermarket—for the short haul to our suburban colonial to stuff the refrigerator and the back pantry6 with our booty.
Before the grocery shopping even began, my father spent at least an hour on Saturday morning at the ledge demarcating the kitchen from the breakfast nook, hand pressed to his forehead, the other hand pressing pen to paper. Here he created the shopping list, a week’s worth of food, on one of his ubiquitous legal pads. He peppered me with questions about what I wanted, the Quisp cereal or Frosted Flakes, the Pepsi Light, the Tab for my mom, and what for dinner? What did I want to eat? “You can have anything”—oh, the bounty! This was how our world worked.
Throughout my life the supermarket had it all. Endless food to feed our family of three and the countless friends my parents loved to cook for.
After my parents’ divorce in the mid-1980s, Dad lived alone in our house; by this time, the grocery store provided a variety of Lean Cuisine entrées and other frozen specialties, which he loved for their convenience, portion size, and calorie count. Long gone, at least from our household, were the Swanson’s TV dinners in their sectioned aluminum trays and Stouffer’s potpies that took thirty minutes in a preheated oven. The microwave oven, introduced in the late 1960s, had become a kitchen necessity by the 1980s—another invention that changed the way many American families ate.
My father stocked the kitchen with chickens and baked potatoes and, as time went on, fresh green beans. I would roast that chicken for us when I, a young adult, returned from New York City to re-gather myself and try to find my way in the world. By then, the mid-1980s, we ate in the dining room—a reflection, I like to think, of our growing appreciation of sharing a well-prepared meal—rather than in the overly lit breakfast nook where we ate when I was young and where, throughout my childhood, I found Dad in the morning. Without fail, he would be drinking a mug of black instant coffee and smoking a Lucky Strike (both grocery store purchases, of course) before it was time for him to catch the train to the Terminal Tower downtown and make the fifteen-minute walk to his office at 1010 Euclid Avenue.
This was how we ate. We took it for granted.
Millennia ago, before grocery stores, finding enough food to eat was the single daily business at hand. When civilizations took root, in part because we learned to cultivate food and create food surpluses, the business of the family was to put up food, to preserve it to keep the family from starving during the winter, because the grocery store (not to mention the car to get to it and haul the goods back) did not exist.
Instead, families farmed (and even most non-farmer families grew and raised some of their food through the 1940s), and they dry-cured pork loin and shoulder and belly and back fat, poached and cooled duck in its own fat in a way that would preserve it for years, and preserved fruit to eat throughout the winter.
But there, on Norwood Road in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, I watched my dad struggle not with spearing a wild hog in the brush, or cutting a slab of pork belly hanging in the kitchen, but rather writing a list of items to pull off a shelf or remove from a case in the grocery store, our community’s shared pantry. This was the food that would keep our family alive and thriving—all available with a convenience unmatched in human history. We had gone from tribes hunting food, gathering it, preserving it, joining in the work of it, protecting it, and then sharing it in larger and larger communities to, thousands of years later, isolated families on suburban streets gathering our food from a single forty-thousand-square-foot store once a week and bringing it back home to eat by ourselves.
The grocery store had become our food surplus, that fundamental mechanism that allowed Homo sapiens to stay in one place and to form communities.
Most of these stores at the time were family-owned, except for the A&P, which in the first half of the twentieth century was loathed, as much as Walmart would one day be, for decimating Main Street, USA. The A&P grew to the size it did (the biggest retailer in the world at one point) by increasing volume to drive prices down. Most of the family-owned supermarkets in Cleveland had only a couple of options to increase their volume. They could open more stores, but without a central distribution center, a warehouse, they would essentially be creating stand-alone businesses rather than efficient chains. Most didn’t have such a center. So instead they merged with other family-owned stores—the Rini’s with the Rego’s in Cleveland, for instance. But by the 1980s, an era of widespread mergers and acquisitions, they were forced to sell out to large multinational companies. Fisher Foods, begun in Cleveland in 1907 by the Fisher brothers, merged with the Fazio family, then merged again with the Stop-N-Shop chains (Rini’s, Rego’s, Russo’s) to form Riser Foods; too much debt and other issues forced them to sell to Giant Eagle. The locally owned Pick-N-Pay became Finast, then sold to the Dutch conglomerate Ahold. By this point only behemoths could offer economies of scale, and the resulting low prices, to lure the customer looking for ever-cheaper food.
And another major cultural shift had begun that threatened grocery stores: More types of retail businesses began to sell food. Convenience stores had been around for decades in some areas of the country, but they began to mushroom in the latter part of the twentieth century and would eventually offer produce along with a tank of gas; drugstores began to sell milk, eggs, and other foods; and eventually, by the 1990s, Costco (1976) and Sam’s Club (Walmart’s 1983 creation) had a nationwide presence. All these places were beginning to sell food, of varying quality and costs, that was once the sole provenance of the supermarket.
The final marker of the food retail conversion from grocery store to supermarket to our modern, fragmented food retail system came in 1988, when, like the big kid doing a cannonball into a crowded swimming pool, Walmart entered the grocery business with its first Super-centers, which added groceries to their other nonfood offerings. Walmart instantly became the world’s biggest grocer. Of its total net sales of $482 billion last year, Walmart stores in the United States accounted for $298 billion. According to its 2016 10-K filing with the SEC, 56 percent of those sales, $167 billion, came from selling groceries. Add Sam’s Club grocery sales to that and Walmart’s total sales of groceries last year were $202 billion. The nation’s largest supermarket chain, Kroger, with its 2,600-odd stores, is a distant second with sales of roughly $110 billion.
Walmart’s grocery revenue, its sales of lettuce and frozen dinners and eggs, beats those of other industry giants, such as General Motors or AT&T. Walmart alone took more than one quarter of all the dollars we spent on groceries. Inevitably, more discount retail stores, such as Target, set up grocery sections in their stores. Everyone, it seemed, was getting into the food business.
Key players in this fragmentation were the niche grocery stores that had begun rapidly expanding in the 1990s, such as Whole Foods Market (opened in 1980, now doing $15 billion in annual sales) and Trader Joe’s (1967, about $9 billion today), followed by newcomers such as Sprouts Farmers Market and Fresh Thyme Farmers Market, hoping to cut in on sales at Whole Foods (dubbed “Whole Paycheck” by some for their comparatively high prices).
All these big-box stores and niche markets promised to offer something the traditional grocery store did not. Whole Foods and the like had a wide range of organic foods (but you couldn’t find Cheerios there); Trader Joe’s carried a range of specialty and exotic packaged and frozen goods sold cheap; Costco offered a tenth of what you could find in a grocery store but promised great savings. And big traditional grocers would soon try to move into the competition’s territory, offering more organic and good-for-you products at big chain prices.
Currently making up only a fraction of grocery sales but adding to this fragmentation of food retailing generally, and looming especially ominously on the horizon for traditional grocers, is the whole world of internet ordering and home delivery. “You know what keeps me up at night?” Jeff Heinen, grandson of the founder of his chain, asked me. He paused: “Amazon.”
The delivery system of food appears to be on the cusp of great change, with not just Amazon but companies such as FreshDirect offering convenient home delivery of pretty much everything imaginable. This of course concerns the grocer, who depends on customers to get in their cars, drive to the store, then pick out and pay for their own food.
Every decade since the 1980s has seen substantial changes in food retailing—changes we ourselves have wittingly and unwittingly demanded to our benefit and detriment. The way we now sell and buy food has also transformed the way we grow, process, distribute, and consume the food we need to stay alive.
And we scarcely give it a thought.
For my father, this fragmentation of the food retailing business was a fantastic boon. Not only were grocers allowed to stay open late in the 1980s and ’90s, they were open on Sundays as well. My dad could now shop multiple times a week. And he had many more stores to choose from. On nonwork days, he would visit as many as five grocery stores, filling up cart after cart with items he could find only at specific stores or taking advantage of sales (he was a coupon-clipper and ever on the hunt for bargains). When he got in line with his proudly chosen food, he didn’t simply stand there and wait; he used the time to scan other shoppers’ carts to see what they had, watched the continuous belts of food conveyed to the checkout girl and the bag boy. What was he missing out on? What did other shoppers know that he didn’t know? He never hesitated to ask a stranger what was in this or that intriguing package.
“When I retire,” he once said, “I think I’m going to bag groceries.”
As my father made his merry way through the ever-expanding central aisles of the supermarket from the 1960s through 2008, he had little inkling what was happening to the food that companies were either preparing for him or manipulating in some way to make it cheaper (typically by removing whatever was nutritious about it in the first place). Dad didn’t care—if it was new and tasted good, he wanted it.
Just so long as they had the food, he didn’t concern himself with how it was made or where it came from. He trusted the grocery store and the makers of his food. One Super Bowl Sunday in the mid-1990s he retrieved a half dozen boxes of appetizers from the freezer and showed them to me with great excitement. “We’re going to try all these different offerings throughout the game—this is going to be fun,” he said. And it would all be so easy—put them in the microwave and tap some buttons. Convenience had been the explicit command within food manufacturing companies since the 1950s, and they had continued to deliver. Seven to eight minutes in the microwave? Too long, let’s try to reduce it to three or four. The convenience of breaded and fried jalapeño peppers could not be denied—no breading or frying required. I remember not a single food we ate that wintry night; I remember only how miserable I felt by the fourth quarter and how desperately I wanted a salad after all that processed, precooked, and microwaved food.
America has always been conscious of diet and its impact on our health, but after five decades of eating processed food and not feeling good, combined with a recognition of the diet-related illnesses that were appearing, America’s health-consciousness went into high gear. We began to understand, as the century changed, that we had better start paying attention to our food. Because the country was getting sick on an epidemic scale. One of every three adults in this country is defined as obese. Children were developing adult diabetes. Such illnesses have become rampant.
Another problem emerged in the first decade of this century, giving rise to the term “food desert,” an acknowledgment that a huge swath of the population doesn’t have easy access to fresh food. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 23.5 million people, about 7 percent of the population, live in food deserts, where they rely on convenience food and fast food for their calories. While the media tends to focus on urban food deserts, food deserts in rural America, where people may not have a grocery store within ten miles of where they live, are equally prevalent and harmful.
It’s a sad irony in a country as wealthy as America that people who live in food deserts have a higher rate of obesity, diabetes, and other food-related diseases than those who have easy and ready access to abundant food. A study in the International Journal of Epidemiology7 notes, “Higher rates of obesity are likely to be found in those areas with the lowest incomes and the least education, particularly among women and certain ethnic groups.” Not surprisingly, those with the lowest incomes are more likely to live in a food desert. Interestingly, this international study found the correlation between food deserts and obesity unique to America. The authors cite a study in the Journal of Preventive Medicine finding evidence that “the presence of supermarkets was associated with a lower prevalence of obesity.”
Why? People tend to eat what’s easiest and cheapest to find, and in food deserts that typically means fast food and food that can be purchased in a drugstore or convenience store. I’m not sure that we need long-term, randomized, double-blind studies on the effects of eating food from these places, because the trials have played out naturally throughout the country in food deserts. Certainly other factors, such as education and tobacco use, have an impact on these populations, but the single factor in improving this high-risk population’s health is improving the quality of the food it eats, and this means making that food easier to get to and also affordable.
But turning food deserts into oases is not easy. Wendell Pierce, the actor famous for his roles in the TV shows The Wire and Treme, wanted to give back to his home city of New Orleans by opening a grocery store in the town of Marrero, Louisiana, a so-called food desert across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. It closed in a year, suggesting that simply making fresh food available will not change people’s eating decisions and habits.
For those who do have options, the situation became ever more complex in the grocery store, as more and more products lined the shelves catering to ever-changing dietary fashions, typically revolving around convenience and low-fat claims. One positive result of Americans’ desire to avoid fat was that they began to eat more vegetables and greens.
Even my father, though he still leaned heavily on frozen Lean Cuisine entrées, began to load up increasingly on salad. Meals for him typically included a popcorn bowl filled with greens and cut vegetables, tossed with a vinaigrette he put together himself—albeit with a store-bought dried seasoning packet.
Alas, all the salad and whole grains in Cleveland wouldn’t have been enough to save him from the lung cancer that appeared in January 2008. All those aforementioned Lucky Strikes, though abandoned when he was in his forties, had done their damage, and by August, the bell tolled for him.
He had returned from the hospital on hospice care and within a few days was no longer able to climb the stairs. Hearing of the situation, my mother flew to Cleveland to see her ex-husband with whom she remained best friends. The night of her arrival I made one of my father’s favorite meals, hamburgers on the grill with lettuce and tomato and homemade French fries, all from the grocery store. He was able to sit at the table and take a few bites before returning to the hospital bed we’d set up in the dining room.
By morning his breathing had become erratic, but on it went as we sat near him or busied ourselves in the open kitchen off the dining room, taking comfort in food. It was a clear summer Saturday and Mom had gone to our excellent North Union Farmers Market—yet another aspect of food retail that has changed radically. In 1994, there were fewer than two thousand farmers’ markets in the United States. But with calls for eating fresh and local growing increasingly loud, such markets blossomed. By that summer of 2008 there were more than four thousand, a number that would double again in the coming years, to the point that this country now has one farmers market for every four or five grocery stores.
I boiled the corn Mom had bought and we stood at the kitchen island, munching away, salty butter dripping down our chins. I like to think that Dad could hear that munching during his final minutes on earth because he was always happiest when people around him were eating. We finished a dozen ears of corn.
My father died right there in our dining room, before noon, a month shy of his seventieth birthday.
I’ve always loved grocery stores without asking myself why. Surely part of my love comes from the happiness they gave my dad. And I suspect this was partly the reason I decided to look more seriously into grocery stores the winter after his death, to understand what they really mean. Little has been written about them in terms of how they work and what they signify.
I chose my father’s favorite grocery store, Heinen’s, as my entry into this world. It’s considered the best in Cleveland in terms of the quality of its products. I wanted a family-run business that was a manageable size for me to write about; Heinen’s has twenty-two stores, not too big and not too small. They are both a traditional supermarket and one that looks to the future in terms of what the grocery store might become.
I should say up front that I don’t make a distinction between a “grocery store” and a “supermarket.”8 Technically we don’t really have stores that sell only groceries, shelf-stable products, anymore. Most stores sell a variety of shelf-stable and perishable goods. So most stores should be considered, technically, supermarkets. But there is a warmth to the term grocery store that encourages one to embrace it and hold on to it. In large part this is because it still does connote—in this era of fragmentation and impersonal service and a food world that grows ever more confusing—a place that can be depended upon, day in and day out, where you can get everything you need to nourish your family. We like to think that our grocery store is run by a grocer (not a supermarketer). And we want to believe that there are capable people in charge of our food, people who care for it and ensure that the products are good.
I met the grocers Tom and Jeff Heinen in March 2009, at the store where my father shopped, and where I often shopped, in Shaker Heights. Tom and Jeff, then fifty-four, are fraternal twins. They both have white hair. Jeff is tall and lean, with a narrow face and large, brown eyes. He no longer limps, thanks to a new hip (“I’m good on replacement parts,” he assured me). Tom, with blue eyes and a rounder face, clearly enjoys his steaks and single malts. They grew up in suburban Cleveland the sons and grandsons of grocers, and they both moved into the business not long after graduating college. Though twins, their temperaments are quite different. Jeff is seen as the conservative one, a man who holds his cards close to his chest, a grocer’s grocer. He’s active in the grocery store, eager to speak with customers. Tom, while every bit a grocer, is more inclined to shoot from the hip and pursue exciting ideas.
One of their managers, who has been in the business for more than forty years, told me, “Jeff is the real grocer. Tom’s not. Tom is the entrepreneur.” Theirs is a kind of spiritual yin and yang that seems to have served the store well.
One of the first things I said to them when I met them was how much my father loved grocery stores, and that he would visit as many as five in a single day.
Tom narrowed his eyes at me, gritted his teeth, and said, “We hate guys like your father.” Meaning, of course, that they would have preferred my dad to do all his shopping at their store, something that used to be the case for most people, but was no longer—perhaps the most salient fact of this story.
We strolled the store and I asked questions and tried to explain why I was so curious about grocery stores, that there seemed to be a good deal of confusion regarding food in our country and that the grocery store seemed like a good place to start to get a better understanding of it. We happened to be in the produce section, and Jeff stopped in front of some plum tomatoes.
“People don’t think about food,” he said. He and Tom were dressed, as all employees were, in blue Oxford cloth shirts with the company’s logo above the left breast pocket. “It can be frustrating. We don’t want to give our customers peaches that are bad. You can get peaches now from Ecuador, but they’re terrible. People see nice-looking peaches in Giant Eagle9 and say, ‘Why don’t you have them?’ Because we don’t think they’re very good. And yes, we think it’s our place to tell people what’s good and what’s not good.
“We do try to educate the consumer,” he continued. “There’s a reason that tomatoes in February look and taste like a box. I had a woman come up to me last week, mid-thirties, nicely dressed, and ask me why we didn’t have wonderful local heirloom tomatoes! I said, ‘Have you looked out the window?’ She did, paused long enough to consider the snow drifts, and said, ‘Hmm, I guess you’re right.’ She’d never really thought about it.”
Exactly, I thought. Thinking. It should be the first step in shopping.
Tom and Jeff said they were open to the idea of my hanging around in their stores. But first, they said, “You should speak to Chris.”
Chris Foltz is a tall, slender man with sandy hair, protuberant brown eyes, an easy smile, and a slight twang retained from Topeka, Kansas, where he spent his teenage years. Chris is third in command here, a former consultant for Tom and Jeff who found that he loved the grocery business, and this company in particular.
“Chris didn’t know squat about groceries,” Tom told me, laughing, “and we made him director of operations!” Indeed, many of the managers I spoke with openly called Chris “the visionary.”
I met Chris at another Heinen’s, farther out in the suburbs and nearer to their headquarters, to stroll the store and talk about the grocery business. He had the enthusiasm of a motivational speaker.
“The more I began to learn about groceries, the more fascinated I became,” he told me as we walked the aisles. “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is amazing.’
“First,” he said, “a grocery store combines a mercantile business model with a manufacturing model. We get product in, put it on a shelf, merchandise it as is. But we also get product in, change that product, and sell it as something else, so you’ve got two different businesses going on under one roof. And the balance between them is changing all the time as our culture, and how we eat, changes.
“This store here, this one store, does $35 million in sales every year, $675,000 a week. We’ve got 150 employees who work here. This one store is its own small company. Heinen’s stores overall will do sales of $600 million this year. That’s more than half a billion dollars, and we’re still considered a small family business!”
“How so?” I asked as we moved past dairy (where, Chris noted, fifteen hundred cartons of eggs and sixteen hundred gallons of milk find their way into shopping carts every week of every year).
“Because we don’t make a lot of money, because the margins are so small,” he explained. “We run this on about a 1 percent margin.10 Look at it from an investor’s standpoint. You do sales of half a billion dollars and you only have a profit of $5 million—what kind of business is that?
“It costs us $10 million to open a new store. We’re investing $4 million in new technology this year. A 5 percent shift in sales can really fuck us up. Nobody in their right mind would actually invest in this business because the return is so small.
“Plus, it’s become incredibly complex. We’ve got forty thousand products in this store. Every week, we have about twelve thousand customers coming into each store, twelve thousand transactions at an average of forty dollars apiece at each store. So much has to be done to make that happen week after week, stuff that shoppers have no idea about. We have to order and keep track of forty thousand products, we’ve got to check it in and get it on the shelves, make it look good so people will buy it, then check it out of the store. If it’s an ingredient, it has to be prepared.”
As Chris talked, I continued to become more eager to explore groceries. Clearly there was considerably more to this subject than a business story.