Grocery is an interesting look at the social and logistical elements of the American food system which gets bogged down in tedious moralizing. Ruhlman is a professional food writer, and he focused on his high-end hometown chain of Heinen's. The early book wanders through his father's love of grocery shopping and cooking at the height of Jet Age large steaks, frozen veggies, and canned meals, and dips back to the birth of the American supermarket with the once-mighty Atlantic and Pacific company. The A&P introduced sealed, branded, packaged food, shifting the business of eating from subsistence farming and a variety of specialized *-mongers who worked on a commodity basis to the deeply weird and modern one-stop shop full of tens of thousands of unique items. Groceries are a big business, approximate $1 trillion annual in the US, and a tough business, with a profit margin of 0.5%.

Unfortunately, the book then veers into a lengthy assault on processed carbs, and you can have my processed carbs when you pry them from my cold, dead, diabetic hands. There's a really good STS book about the alliance of cheap corn, clever processing techniques, and regulatory somnolence which wrecked the American diet, but this ain't it chief. Heinen's has a staff doctor who approves healthy food, a charismatic health shaman named Dr. Todd, but you can also get your Triple Frosted Cookie-O at Heinen's because it's a business like any other, and people will shop where they can get their garbage. A journey to organic free-range lamb is a similar digression. I can't find out how much Lava Lake Lamb costs, due to Covid related disruptions, but I'm sure the price is Waygu beef like, if I could buy it. Healthy and sustainable food cannot be so expensive as to be a status symbol.

The book returns to some interesting areas, with a trip to buyer's conference for new products, where thousands of small vendors and grocery store product managers are competition to get the new fad food on shelves. Heinen's plays a fascinating role in this, as a company big enough to make a small kale granola manufacturer's product line, but without the immediate nationwide scale demands of Whole Foods or (god forbid) Walmart. Ruhlman also covers the rise in prepared foods, which he describes as "store-made leftovers", and which are an increasingly large but spottily profitable area.

So, interesting, but also a self-consciously foodie book, with foodie politics.