The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly heightened our awareness of our food supply — and the grocery stores we visit to stock up. Grocery workers became even more essential in March and April, as many of the rest of us were sent home to work or were laid off.

But how much do most customers know about what really goes on behind the scenes in our local supermarkets — now or before the pandemic? What's gained and lost as all that food makes its way to the shelves?

Author Benjamin Lorr spent five years looking into that as he studied all aspects of American supermarkets — from the suppliers, the distributors, and supply routes, to the workers in the retail outlets themselves. In the reporting for his new book The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, Lorr met with farmers and field workers and spent 120-hours-straight driving the highways with a trucker as she made her multistate rounds. He worked the fish counter at a Whole Foods market for a few months, and went to trade shows to learn about entrepreneurs who were trying to break into the industry. He also traveled to Asia to learn about commodity fishing – finding human rights violations along his journey.