Book Review: Grocery

Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America
Michael Ruhlman
Sociology, Food

The blurb describes Grocery as a "mix of personal history, social commentary, food rant, and immersive journalism." That's a pretty good capsule description. It leaves out the fact that some of those components are better than others.

The food rant is the worst. It's nothing but a combination of conventional foodie wisdom and personal prejudices. It talks a lot about trends in food, in a way that's very convincing if you ignore that fraction of the American public that doesn't happen to live in Brooklyn. You will not find, for example, any acknowledgment that organic accounts for all of 4% of U.S. food sales. What you will find is Mr. Crankypants-style assertions like "Canola stands for Canadian oil association--that's not food," which blithely disregards the fact that "canola" is in fact nothing more than a conventionally-bred form of the ancient crop traditionally known as rapeseed.

By contrast, the glimpse inside the day-to-day working of a modest-sized regional grocery chain (Heinen's, in the Cleveland area) is fascinating. Ruhlman got a tremendous level of access and cooperation from the Heinen family, and he does a great job of walking us through the things that they deal with. How do you set up the store? How do you compete with bigger chains when everyone has the same corn flakes? How is food buying and food selling changing? To give you an idea of how enticing this is, I now kind of want to go to Cleveland in order to go to a grocery store--specifically, this grocery store.

Finally, Ruhlman also does a wonderful job mixing in his own personal narrative. Chapter 1, entitled "My Father's Grocery-Store Jones," opens like this:

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.

This touching family story is threaded neatly through the book. It makes up for the boring food rant segments. It makes Grocery more than the sum of its parts. It's about the grocery business, yes, but it's also about what food means to us.