Ford Factory Assembly Line Woman Engine Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Five years ago, Jeanne Marie Laskas decided to meet the people who power her lights, pick fresh fruit for her grocer, and clear away her discarded trash. 

She got what she wanted, spending weeks in a Maine migrant labor camp, a California landfill, an Arizona gun shop, the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, a Texas beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, and even the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. 

"It was really this sense of challenging my inner spoiled brat," said Laskas, a creative writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "I just think that light and water and fresh vegetables are sort of my rights. If something goes wrong with them, I'm almost, like, mad. Then I go, 'Wait a second. This is sort of a privilege of the civilized world.'" 

Laskas, whose book, Hidden America, comes out on Sept. 13, said immersing herself in these workers' lives made her hyper-aware of what it means to be a consumer. 

"I went from being the kid who never has to make the dinner, a passive consumer, to someone who was involved in the process. Suddenly I was a participant ... I get all that went into this," she said. 

"The most obvious example is the trash. Having been riding on top of that trash on top of a bulldozer, compacting it and watching it, and seeing the team—not just the bulldozer drivers, but the engineers who go into making that piece of trash go away—I will never look at packaging the same way again in my life." 

Laskas doesn't take our bargain prices for granted either. Riding in the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, she quickly realized "there's a reason everything is so cheap."

Hidden America is footing the bill. 

"Why aren't we picking our food? Well, [being a migrant farmer] is so low-paying that no one will do it," she said. "So we say, let's make it better-paying. All of the sudden those blueberries are $30 a pound. Bringing in cheap labor is the only way to make it happen." 

But consumers don't want that. They want free delivery, same-day shipping and cheap generic brands at the grocery store. 

"I talked to truckers, who, when they do all the math, their take-home pay is like $26,000 a year when it's all over," she said. "The truckers pay for their truck, the truck's maintenance, the gas, everything. They do the haul, and then they get a percentage of the haul. As fuel prices increase, we're not seeing the price of goods necessarily increase. Well, then, who's paying the cost of the gas?"

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