Further Reading
For those interested in pursuing some of the individual topics explored in The Secret Life of Groceries further, I wanted to provide a list of the texts I found most valuable while writing. As with Hell-Bent, it only gets more interesting.
The History of Grocery
If you only have time for one:
Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping by Rachel Bowlby. Columbia University Press, 2002.
For more depth:
Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century by Tracey Deutsch.
Fresh: A Perishable History by Susanne Freidberg. Belknap Press, 2010
The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes by Thomas Hine. Back Bay Books, 1997.
America the Bountiful: How the Supermarket Came to Main Street: An Oral History. Beatrice Companies, 1986.
Trucking
If you only have time for two:
The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream. University of California Press, 2016
The Truth About Trucking by Aubrey Smith, 2009.
For more depth:
Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation by Michael Belzer. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Trucking Country: The Road to Wal-Mart Econony by Shane Hamilton. Princeton Univeristy Press, 2014.
The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road by Finn Murphy. Norton, 2017.
In the Driver’s Seat: Interstate Trucking – A Journey by Marc Mayfield, 2011.
The Psychology and Sociology of Consumption
If you only have time for two:
A Theory of Shopping by Daniel Miller. Cornel University Press, 1998
Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods by Grant McCracken. Indiana University Press, 1990.
For more depth:
The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism by Colin Campbell. Palgrave Macmillian, 2018.
The Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption edited by Stephanie Preston, Morten Kringlebach, and Brian Knutson. MIT Press, 2014
Eco-Standards, Product Labeling and Green Consumerism by Magnus Bostrom and Mikael Klintman. Palgrave Macmillian, 2011
The Tastemakers by David Sax. Public Affairs, 2014