THE SPINACH KING

Uncovering devastating family secrets.

Seabrook, a New Yorker staff writer, set out to write the dramatic story of his family’s Seabrook Farms, dubbed by Life magazine as the “biggest vegetable factory on earth.” An elegant essayist and meticulous researcher, Seabrook drew on the voluminous diaries of his father, combed through decades of newspaper coverage, bank records, and litigation, and interviewed scores of former workers, business partners, and family members. He describes in intimate detail the multigenerational story of the company’s transformation from his immigrant great-grandfather’s small farm to the largest in New Jersey with 50,000 acres, growing one-third of the nation’s frozen vegetables. The author’s grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, prospered by modeling his vegetable-growing enterprise on the automobile assembly line. He hired thousands of immigrant workers from places as far-flung as Jamaica and Estonia, Black workers from the South, and 2,000 Japanese Americans from World War II incarceration camps. But all was not well within the family. Beset by alcohol-fueled misjudgments and intergenerational mistrust, the company’s meteoric rise “triggered a psychic case of the bends…not from nitrogen bubbles in the blood but from champagne bubbles at the dinner table.” With profits from frozen lima beans and spinach, the author’s father, Jack, led a glamorous lifestyle, including a romance with Eva Gabor. Seabrook grew up comfortably in this well-heeled WASP homestead, but finding a 1934 Nation article radically changed his view of the company and his family. The article documents a strike at Seabrook where workers protested wage cuts and decrepit (and segregated) housing. C.F. enlisted vigilantes, including the Ku Klux Klan, who beat the strikers with rubber hoses and axe handles. The author’s heart sank when he learned that his grandfather and beloved uncles were part of the brutal assault. Though excessive in some details, this lucidly written family history provides a unique lens through which to view changes in food production and distribution in the United States.

Deftly weaving personal and commercial history to document the rise and fall of a towering agricultural enterprise.