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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #127: Supermarkets and the U.S. food supply

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This week's "food for thought" excerpt is from The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket (2020), by Benjamin Lorr.

"Grocery stores -- and the supply chain that has grown up around them -- are shockingly efficient. We spend only 10 percent of our budget on food, compared to 40 percent by our great grandparents in 1900 and 30 percent by our grandparents in 1950s. It is a number that has been decreasing the entire century along with the rise of mass supply chains. In the early republic, around the War of 1812, nearly 90 percent of the population worked to produce the nation's food; it was a grueling physical life, and in addition to being costly, the food produced was of uneven quality, in tightly limited quality, and could and did kill through disease. Now less than 3 percent of our population produces enough food to feed us all. It is easy to wax poetic about food before the rise of industry -- about eating the way our grandmother's grandmother ate -- but the fact is we spend less money than almost every other country in the world on food and we spend less time gathering that food than at any time in history. Somehow each year those numbers continue to shrink while the quality, quantity, variety, and safety of the food available has gotten better and better."