Trucking is now an industry thriving on its workers’ vulnerability

boycotting a single product is pointless. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground,” he says. “What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards. In trafficking, the media focuses on why and where poor people get into difficult situations. But maybe we should be looking at why they are poor to begin with?” The answer is, of course, the “hunger behind our hunger.”

the entire supply chain putting food in our supermarkets has been whittled down to the sharpest edge of profitability by suit-wearing Midwesterners who pride themselves on exemplifying the American capitalist spirit. It’s more surprising that anybody put the Thai shrimp industry story on a newspaper front page, Lorr thinks, than it is that we’re eating the fruits of indentured labor.

This kind of casting is true, Lorr explains, of nearly all supermarket employees, who would be automated away in a heartbeat if the data didn’t show that the average American consumer prefers a human touch.

Shrimp are perhaps the paradigmatic grocery store item. They used to be expensive, and now they’re not. They are born animals, and when they die they become meat, then cargo, then merchandise represented by a bar code—a product with a notably high profit yield on the grocery floor because it’s a dirt-cheap factory-farmed import.