Lost In The Supermarket

Michael Ruhlman is a prolific author, writing mostly about food. He does cookbooks, recipes, reviews, books, blogs, articles and more. He is always publishing, always getting prose out, and there is a good chance that you may have come across his work in a newspaper or magazine. It’s easy to understand why. Ruhlman writes as a friend, an informed colleague, and as the man next door (who loves to eat well).

Ruhlman’s recently published book, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of American Food, is a non-fiction account of the supermarket, written with a focus on a small family run chain, Heinen’s, in Cleveland. It is not a comprehensive account of the supermarket industry. Nor is it a business history, or what is all to common in the books about food, a polemic on what we should or should not be eating. Instead, Ruhlman is after information – about the store, they buying and selling of food, about his father, and about himself. To the extent that one can write a personal book about a grocery store, Ruhlman has done it. The book features some very interesting genre-crossing observations.

Ruhlman’s late father figures prominently. He loved to shop, to cook, and to feed people. Prominently among Ruhlman’s childhood memories are shopping with his father at Heinen’s, buying food for a week’s worth of meals, and large get togethers with family, friends and neighbors. The shopping trip represented family, prosperity, choice and optimism. Ruhlman senior was not alone in his love of the supermarket. We learn that for many, particularly of a certain generation, the boomers, fondness for grocery store trips and opulence is all too common.

Over the years, Ruhlman’s parents divorced, ending the shopping trips and the large meals. Ruhlman, too, is writing while experiencing a divorce and traumatic change. He grew up in Cleveland, but the book jacket notes that he now divides his time between New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. One does not have to be much of a detective to appreciate that this is a tangled book. Ruhlman’s interest in Heinen’s grocery is deeply tied to a host of memories, values and meaning. The knot of issues enhance, constrain and complicate the book.

The book is wide-ranging, moving from popular culture to what grocery store owners think and do, then back again. Ruhlman walks us around the supermarket, examining the differences in produce, dairy, delis and processed foods. There is a reason that milk is usually located at the back of a supermarket – and it’s more to do with a place for coolers than a marketing trick. The changes in how groceries operate and what they sell has been tremendous. More changes are anticipated, too. It’s a very complicated business with many moving parts and small profit margins.

The book concludes with the location of a Heinen’s in a restored downtown Cleveland building. It’s an expensive project. It also represents a new direction for the city and people’s expectation for shopping and food. Ruhlman is both elated by the new space and also saddened by loss.

Remember The Clash’s Lost in the Supermarket? Great track on one of the best albums of all time, London Calling, written all the way back in 1979. The song ran repeatedly through my head when reading Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery. Sometimes shopping is not really about shopping.

I’m all lost in the supermarket
I can never shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

David Potash

April 8, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Making Stuff

On the recommendation of a bookstore staffer, I picked up Joshua Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. I know – a book about factories? I was skeptical but she was persuasive. Turns out that she was right. It’s a surprisingly good read, presenting a host of historical changes in new light. Behemoth is well-written, accessible, and not dumb.

Freeman is a distinguished professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. He has serious history chops. His aim here, though, is not to overwhelm the reader with footnotes and in-the-weeds references and sourcing. The pace is swift, the prose is clear, and driving the book is a clear narrative tone that calls attention to something that many of us have missed: the importance of the big factory in the development of modern life. Freeman pulls from economics, anthropology, politics and history to explain the growth and key role the super-large factories have played.

Freeman begins with New England and the textile mills in the early 1800s, then moves to the large steel mills of the latter 1800s. Ford and the creation of the big automobile manufacturing facilities is next, and Freeman ties them elegantly to the mega-factories of the Soviet Union. He explores mass production and mass consumption, closing with a look at the massive factories in China and Vietnam. Foxconn City is an appropriate focus of attention and a good way to end the study.

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the book is a heightened appreciation of economic and technical change – particularly when it comes to making stuff. Material goods are central to the way that we live. How they come into being is fascinating on so many levels. Freeman does a fine job teasing out that question, providing historical answers across decades and borders.

Behemoth would be a fun book to teach, especially in an interdisciplinary course.

David Potash

April 6, 2019 Curiouser and Curiouser, Reviews

Pat Barker Again

Working one’s way through Pat Barker’s novels is not work at all. But it also is neither easy nor comforting. Barker is an extraordinarily perceptive writer and the precision of her prose compels attention. She is beyond thoughtful; her attention is acute. I have come to realize that there is a clinical quality to her writing that is captivating – has me reading more and more – and also just a little bit scary. It is imposing.

Barker’s first big breakout novel was Union Street, a book that I had heard referenced years ago in discussions about “women’s literature.” While it features women, the categorization is inelegant at best. Union Street is much more, even with a relatively simple structure: seven interrelated chapters, each focusing on a different female character, all of whom live on the same street in a northern English city in the 1970s. The women are working class, poor, and range in age from early adolescence to aged and dying. The immediacy of their lives, struggles and circumstances impels the narrative, with the impositions on their lives dominating thoughts and actions. The plot does not move from conflict to resolution; the characters’ lives do not move from conflict to resolution. That’s also how people lead their lives, especially those of limited means. Life is often ongoing struggle.

Throughout, Barker gives the characters voice and agency, even if their language is rough and their agency severely constrained. It is powerful prose, carrying the reader into a world far removed from romance. It is also neither didactic or judgmental It is easy to see why the book, which came out in the early 1980s, generated so much attention. It remains relevant, an eye-opening read.

Published decades later, Barker’s Border Crossing is a frightening novel about the evil that children can do. Is it possible to become “good”? Does time served make a difference? And what might our responsibilities be to those who did something awful as a child? It is high gothic literature.

Set against the backdrop of a dissolving marriage, Tom and Lauren live in north of England. Trying for a child, they’ve grown farther apart or, perhaps, realized that they were never all that close. While on a walk, Tom rescues a young man who attempts suicide. The young man turns out to be a figure in Tom’s past. He is Danny, recently released from prison, who murdered an old woman as a child a decade earlier. Tom is a counselor and had testified about Danny. Tom and Danny start sessions, probing into issues of family, guilt, crime and identity.

Barker’s exploration of the characters is clinical. The dialogue is masterfully presented. In elegant prose, she lays bare the characters innermost feelings without reduction. Nor is the reader enlightened through gimmicks or third-person narration. Instead, the characters come across as complicated, high-functioning, and damaged people. Reading tells us much about them and about Barker, who is unremitting in her push for deeper understanding and truth. It’s high literature and a bit of a thriller, with uncomfortable tension throughout. Border Crossing isn’t diverting – it’s engrossing.

David Potash

April 5, 2019 Reviews

What Happened? College Humor Gone Bad

Who doesn’t enjoy a good satire of higher education? Colleges are easy to send up – or at least they used to be. When I remember Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or Jane Smiley’s Moo, I think laughter, smiles and knowing glances. Recently reading Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, though, has me in a different state of mind. It might be just that book, which I found to be decidedly unfunny. Or it might be something different. I may have changed or perhaps something broader has shifted in our thinking about college satire.

Russo is a successful author whose fiction has been well-received for decades. He writes for the television and movies, too, and has even won a Pulitzer. Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool was made into an excellent movie with Paul Newman. It’s a favorite of mine. In 1997, Russo’s higher education comedy Straight Man was published. The reviews were consistently positive. Kirkus called it “gloriously funny” and the New York Times, New Yorker, and USA Today all liked it.

The book is first-person account from an English faculty member and acting department chair who is teaching at second or third tier college in Pennsylvania. Or more precisely, our narrator and faculty member is paid to teach but spends a ton of time on other issues while wrestling with a mid-life crisis. The protagonist, hero and anti-hero, William Henry Devereaux Jr., experiences a host of crises and dramas, flirtations and escapades, over a short period of time. Included in the escapades are campus politics (petty and serious), sex and flirting, sexual harassment, budget problems, student complaints, health complaints, family issues, drinking and drinking, and a whole lot more. Devereaux is a contrarian, a curmudgeon, a friend to some and also a really nasty colleague. He is difficult to everyone. We may be supposed to believe that he has a heart of gold, but chronicling his behavior makes it a difficulty claim to believe.

Entitled mediocrity best describes the environment in and around the fictional “West Central Pennsylvania University” of Straight Man. Mocking the characters’ pretensions would easier if they all were not so sad, so frustrated, and so deeply unhappy. The relatively disinterested university employer serves mostly as a foil. One could also argue that it is a facilitator and enabler to poor behavior across the board. Imagine over the top inappropriate actions, the kind that might show up on daytime reality television (Jerry Springer?), with faculty and staff as the stars.

Bracketing the strengths and weakness of this one particular book, I am starting to believe that the easy satirical pickings of higher education are now a thing of the past. We may have pretentious institutions and players, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between. Decades of reduced funding, attacks from the left, right, above and below, and pressures to do more with less have rendered much of academia as toothless. Higher education may be generating a great deal of attention, but it is not setting the agenda or framing the conversation. As a consequence, it offers a fewer targets, and smaller ones at that, for lampooning.

Following a similar path, it is difficult today to make fun of the struggling student, burdened by debt, who hopes to do well and is not academically strong. Perhaps we can mock the entitled and pretentious. However, there are few of those students at smaller public universities. There is simply less humor to be squeezed out of these scenarios.

One could, I imagine, go super dark to make the situation funny. There have been funny novels that take place in all manner of awful situations, from wartime to future dystopias. They are different, though, than Straight Man. The book plays it straight. It’s tragic, not comedic. The book jacket extols Russo’s “high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.” I think that he fell off on the side of unhappiness.

David Potash

January 24, 2019 Reviews

Evangelicals and American History

Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is an outstanding work of history. A hefty 700 pages, the book is comprehensive without losing voice or focus. It’s a pleasure to read. It’s also the kind of work that should be read by many. Understanding the evangelical tradition in the United States is essential to deeper comprehension of American culture and politics.

Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist. Her aim here is to give a comprehensive review of the evangelical movement from the First Great Awakening in colonial America through the present. The book’s focus, though, is on more recent events, from the 1970s to the present. It is a work of synthesis and integration. Fitzgerald has read the scholarship extensively. The Evangelicals has a learned feel to it but it is not pedantic.

Evangelicals are Protestants who believe that the Bible is the ultimate religious authority. They come from many traditions. Evangelicalism is an expansive term and it has changed over the years. Common to all evangelicals is enthusiastic preaching of the gospels. The origin of the term comes from Greek for “good news.”

The books is not just about religion. It explains the thread of the evangelical movement, and its leadership, with great awareness of the political environment. Fitzgerald’s focus give us a much better comprehension of what is, and who is, the Christian right. Perhaps the book’s greatest argument and takeaway is that regardless of the waxing and waning of the Christian right in the past fifty years, the movement’s underlying values – the spirit that animates it – were forged in the nineteenth century. Historical knowledge is essential.

The book, in fact, made me want to go back to the classroom to teach history. The evangelical tradition in American has been important for centuries. I have taught survey courses and reading The Evangelicals has highlighted to me just how important. The book offers and extremely helpful lens for understanding.

David Potash

January 23, 2019 Reviews

Pat Barker is a Genius

No ifs, ands or buts about it – Pat Barker is one of the best novelists around. A bit more than a decade ago I read her Regeneration trilogy, three novels taking place in World War I. It was gripping, amazing, and memorable. They gave me goosebumps. The books were well-read, well-reviewed, and received multiple awards. The last novel in the three, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.

I don’t really know why, but I went for years without reading anything else by her. Barker kept writing, gathering up awards and putting out novels. When I came across a recent review praising yet another novel by her, I decided that it was high time to reacquaint myself with Barker. After a few more reads, my estimation of her has increased.

Barker wrote Double Vision in 2003. It’s a tightly written and yet wandering story with a hole at its middle: a character who was killed in the Middle East. His grieving wife and friend reconnect. No gimmicks in the plot. Instead, events unwind methodically as characters work to make sense of loss, life and meaning. There’s crime, passion, and a gothic feel to it – but without undue ornamentation.

In 2015 she published Noonday, the third novel in a trilogy that also stands on its own. It’s very good – no surprises there – and it deals in a very mature way with trauma, memory, and how people navigate through “history.” Again, at the center of the novel are few well developed characters who interact with each other, trying to figure out relationships, commitment and and meaning. Set during the WWII Blitz, violence defines the environment.

Both novels are sure of themselves and where they are going. Reading them provoked me into thinking through why Barker is so good, why her writing is so powerful. One answer rests on her intelligence. Her observations, her plotting, her language – it’s impossible to read Barker and not be aware that someone incredibly smart and talented has put it together. Even with her relatively straightforward language, I am aware of great wisdom, coupled with curiosity, moving the story along.

Barker shuns the unnecessary . Sentences and paragraphs, ideas and story, are clear and unencumbered. Her words are precise. She does not dumb things down, either, when parsing. It was good to reach for a dictionary when I came across “lordotic.” It’s the curve above your butt and in the paragraph, it fit perfectly.

Themes in Barker’s books are often unsettling. She writes about violence, trauma, and how people manage through it. She is generous with her characters while unsparing in her insights. I feel as though I have learned when I read her – though I never get the sense that she is didactic. There is little frivolity in her novels.

Bottom line – Barker’s writing is mature. It is literature, not fiction, from a grown up for grown ups. And when I’m ready for that, and not distraction, it makes for a very welcome read.

Thank you, Pat Barker, and please keep the prose coming.

David Potash

January 18, 2019 Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Completely Rethinking Policing

Alex S. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His work is policy-based and in the public sphere. His latest book, The End of Policing, is a comprehensive rethink of policing and police as part of the larger criminal justice system and society itself. The aim here is not tweaks or adjustments. Vitale instead assembles just about every argument he can lay his hands to in order to present as dramatic a book, and theme, as possible. He identifies the growth and changes in the role of policing as the key justice issue facing our country. Vitale asserts that the police’s primary role today is not about fighting crime – it is about controlling poor people and those that might disrupt society. It’s a no-holds barred book that calls for a complete re-imagining of how we keep ourselves safe and secure. The result is fascinating and provocative – without necessarily being accurate or persuasive.

Opening the book, Vitale provides a brief historical overview of how police forces emerged in history. Those early efforts, which were often about maintaining political power through enforcing racism, classism and other forms of control, remain embedded in police forces today, he argues. Policing can actually worsen the problems it is supposedly is supposed to solve, he claims. The “wars” we have waged in recent years – on homelessness, on gangs, on drugs and on terror – have been distractions and means to increase funding and support for a neoliberal police state. In other words, we have started to label every social problem as an issue best addressed through more policing. Vitale buttresses his arguments with data and illustrations of the militarization and funding of modern policing.

Vitale claims that regardless of whatever reforms police might make, from use of data to community policing, the underlying hostility between the policed public and the police will remain. In addition to being ineffective, Vitale also argues that the expansive use of the police for social control is very expensive.

What we should be doing, Vitale states, is really thinking through what, exactly, we want the police to do. He also want society to engage in a major re-think about social problems, like poverty, hunger and homelessness, using different lenses of policy and expectations. If this takes place, he argues, then there will be a different way for society to think about crime, crime prevention and justice.

He calls for legalizing sex work, drugs, and keeping police out of the schools. Vitale believes that much more can be done with restorative justice and community involvement in public safety. Vitale seeks more funding for  mental health professionals and mental health systems, as well as for troubled adolescents and the jobless. He wants, in sum, an across the board redo of how government supports and promotes social welfare.

Vitale’s controversial argument makes one think. The book forces hard questions about what and how policing works. It raises many questions, most of which have me wondering about expectations, change and politics. I would be interested to hear how community and political leaders would respond to the book and its arguments. My hunch is that it would be greeted with skepticism by some and interest by others, especially those who leading the push for more accountable democratic socialism in government. But would a redo of policing be the first move, the foot in the door, the area of change that would generate the most support? I do not believe so. For many good reasons, we need and depend upon a professional and accountable police force. They are, in many ways, doing what no one else can or will do.

We also are often reminded, too, that the threats that social scientists tell us are more real are not necessarily the threats that move policy or politics. Take gun control, for example. Many in the policy sphere argue that a curtailment of availability of weapons would increase safety. Politically, there is less willingness to move in that direction. Terrorism is another example. Concern about foreign terrorists has been a catalyst for many policy changes. The data suggests, though, that there are probably more “likely” threats.

For the near future, I believe that Vitale’s book will find a more receptive audience in academia, especially sociology classrooms, than in the neighborhoods or city halls.

David Potash

January 17, 2019 Reviews

Urban Love Letter

How does one “know” a city? Can we even make sense of a metropolis? William James called a baby’s first experiences in the world to be a “blooming buzzing confusion” and I think that it’s an apt description of trying to take in the fullness of a city. It’s an overwhelming task. To find connection and meaning in an urban setting, we blinker our sensations, using moments, glances, and focus. A building represents a neighborhood, a person stands for a type, and an exchange can reflect something greater.

One of my favorite genres of writing comes from the ambitious author who tries to capture a feel, a slice, a perspective on a city through literary non-fiction. The flaneurs of 19th century France are well-known examples, but they exist in other times and places, too: Pliny the Younger on Rome, Pepys on London, Balzac on Paris, and Dreiser on Chicago are part of this tradition. They produce journalism that is written with the care and creativity of fiction. They are our best explainers of urban life. And to their ranks, I recommend adding Suketu Mehta on Bombay.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is Mehta’s 2004 love letter to Bombay. Now known at Mumbai, the city has had many names, Mehta tells us. It truly is an overwhelming metropolis. The scale and scope of the Bombay is staggering: 18.4 million people in 2011 and it is India’s largest, and densest, city. Mehta was born in Bombay and left for the US at the start of high school. He was educated in America, became a writer (fiction, nonfiction and screenplays), and returned to Bombay in his mid-30s with a family. He spent more than two years there, investigating the city and its seedier underbelly, interviewing gangsters, policemen, actors, producers, and a host of men and women about town. It’s something akin to Luc Sante’s Lowlife but for India. Maximum City is a fascinating read.

Mehta talks with the poor and the super wealthy, with poets and merchants, with cooks and gourmands. His curiosity and willingness to listen is extraordinary. It’s clear that tons of research went into Maximum City, including dangerous interactions with killers and other criminals. Mehta is unsparing in his accounts of the corruption, incompetence and indifference of the city. And yet – and it’s an important “yet” – he loves the city and its people. There’s great warmth and compassion in his writing.

Maximum City is not a travel book. I’m sure, too, that boosters and realtors hate it. But for those of us who have not been to Mumbai/Bombay and are curious, for those of us who find ourselves drawn to cities and city life, it is a book well worth our time.

David Potash

December 31, 2018 Reviews

Been Marketed?

Seth Godin is a very popular marketer, author, businessman and promoter. His latest book, This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See, is a marketer’s delight. It’s lovely to look at, easy to hold in one hand, and a doorway to the larger world of Seth Godin. He’s got a blog, a website, a system and an Amazon landing page featuring his many books. He tweets and is on Facebook. Seth is on Instagram and on LinkedIn. He’s a serial entrepreneur, starting several businesses as well as training. Godin is an influencer, a person riding and trying to direct the electronic wave.

What’s the question I heard from an advertising person decades ago: “How much sizzle and how much steak?” It’s a good to consider because it’s difficult to tell just how effective Seth’s wisdom – usually dispensed in bite-sized nuggets – really is. It’s easy to read and digest, that’s for sure. But would it work for your business, your idea, your brand?

Godin’s big-picture message is straightforward. If you want to connect with an audience, you have to believe in what you’re doing, build trust, and do/offer something that helps the audience. He is a believer in really understanding stories: stories that we tell ourselves and stories that we tell each other. Godin frames marketing as about change – and stories can change behavior. He cautions readers not to try to change everyone but instead to focus on smaller groups. With the right size and the right story, one can build trust and a reliable relationship. Work on a segment, a population, Godin advises, that you can get to know and help. It makes sense.

Missing from the book are studies, data, sources or any of the traditional trappings of a scholarly business book. It is neither monograph nor textbook. This is about enthusiasm, aphorisms, personal stories and accessible wisdom. He’s a marketing cheerleader with refreshingly ethical take on the business and how to market.

It is easy to see how Seth Godin and his message would inspire so many. The challenge, I wager, is in the commitment and the follow through. Perhaps a New Year’s resolution?

David Potash

December 29, 2018 American Culture Today

Realistic Democracy From Political Scientists

My education as an historian carried with it appreciation for – as well as distrust of – political science. When historians congregate, political science often gets short shrift. The complaints are more than just sniffing at the math, too (“Formulas don’t explain history!). Political science often looks at political behavior through a lens that historians have difficulty understanding or appreciating. At the same time, many of us trained in history often cast a covetous glance at the political scientists. They are great at testing the counterfactual, at looking across time and location, and at advancing very useful arguments. Whether we admit it or not, we often borrow from them.

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels is the kind of political science that historians admire. It is clearly written, informative, and a powerful corrective to those in the field that believe that political science has all the answers (not that many do . . . ). Also, Achen and Bartels do an outstanding job with their history. Their examples are well-researched and well written.

The book explains common theories about how democracies work and how voters are supposed to make decisions. Are they making rational choices? Or using heuristics? Or perhaps they engage in retrospective voting, rewarding or punishing candidates and parties for actions? Theorists have been outlining these and other theories for decades. Unfortunately, when Achen and Bartels look at American history and the data, none of these theories hold up. They don’t really explain anything particularly well. It is a problem for political science and for all of us, today, thinking about how our democratic institutions work.

It turns out the social identity and party identity, with all its irrationality, best explains voter behavior. The arguments set out in the book are solid and difficult to refute. Voters actually change their priorities in order to align their thinking with that of their party. When push comes to shove, democracies rest on less than rational, but organized, group behavior. More telling still, when parties are relatively balanced, election results can depend upon lies, distortions and plain bad information. Democracy might be the best worst system of government. Achen and Bartels are very effective in showing just how “worst” it can be.

It’s sobering. The authors are able to cover a great deal of ground, theoretical and historical, quickly and convincingly. The lack of rationality  is also something that most political historians realize when digging deep into American history. It may not be news – but it is  extremely important. And for those of us who are paying close attention to recent politics, Democracy for Realists is a very helpful addition to the bookcase. It explains quite a lot.

David Potash

December 28, 2018 American Culture Today, Reviews