{"id":15155,"date":"2025-07-22T10:13:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T10:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/15155\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T10:13:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T10:13:11","slug":"the-spinach-king-the-tale-of-an-agricultural-dynasty-and-its-dark-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/15155\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spinach King \u2014 the tale of an agricultural dynasty and its dark secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

In 1955, Life magazine ran a photo spread on Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, calling it the \u201cbiggest vegetable factory on earth\u201d. Jack Seabrook, chief executive of a business that grew a third of the frozen vegetables in the US, stood triumphantly in front of 5,000 workers and his father Charlie (CF) Seabrook, known as the Henry Ford of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

Four years later, this picture of US enterprise and familial harmony imploded, with Jack Seabrook and his brothers trying to have their alcoholic, drug-addicted father declared insane, and CF responding by selling the family business and cutting them out of his will. So ended the reign of the Spinach King and his anglophile, carriage-riding playboy son.<\/p>\n

Most historians of family businesses face the challenge of uncovering the human secrets within them. John Seabrook, a New Yorker writer and author of books on culture and music including Nobrow (2000) and The Song Machine (2015), had the opposite problem. He knew little of farming but almost too much about his late father Jack and grandfather Charlie.<\/p>\n

\"AA mix of peas and carrots is prepared for the Seabrook Farms\u2019 freezing plant \u00a9 Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n

The Seabrook males (including the author until he went sober) were dedicated tipplers but, as John quotes a psychologist writing: \u201cIn my experience, the business itself is usually [the] family\u2019s primary drug and other dependencies follow.\u201d The industrial-scale farm, dating to the 19th century in the Garden State, was the substance they abused.<\/p>\n

So, Seabrook has plenty of material and tells most of it entertainingly, with a wry sense of humour. There are two stories: the one about how Seabrook Farms became one of America\u2019s leading agricultural forces before flaming out, and that of the family and the Oedipal struggles of Seabrook sons to undermine their fathers\u2019 reputations.<\/p>\n

There is a tour de force scene of social comedy in which Jack Seabrook affects Wasp bemusement at his son\u2019s girlfriend (later wife) asking for a mere glass of wine, before descending to his wine cellar in search of a vintage bottle to decant by candlelight. At the rear of the cavernous cellar sits a safe whose combination has mysteriously been lost (or has it?).<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Seabrook also brings vividly to life the week of glamour when his parents met at the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in Monaco in 1956. He was a mid-century farm boy turned Manhattan socialite, and she was a gossip columnist for a New York newswire, who found a scoop about the theft of jewels while lunching with her future husband.<\/p>\n

The family business meanwhile recovered from going bankrupt in 1924 to agricultural hegemony under the capricious, autocratic CF. From his early experiments with crop irrigation, he jumped on the opportunity to freeze lima beans and spinach, helped by Clarence Birdseye. Later, Jack Seabrook developed the family\u2019s own brand.<\/p>\n

This is a tremendous tale, but one understands why Seabrook\u2019s mother, when told before her death that he was thinking of writing about it, tried to warn him off. \u201cMaybe she knew what I was going to find out,\u201d he writes. Or maybe she knew the men of her family\u2019s obsession with grinding down their ancestors.<\/p>\n

\"\"Summer Books 2025<\/p>\n

The best titles of the year so far. From politics, economics and history to art, food and, of course, fiction \u2014 FT writers choose their favourite reads of the year so far<\/a><\/p>\n

CF and Jack\u2019s weapons were trusts and lawsuits; Seabrook\u2019s is the pen. The story darkens as he digs into family files and newspaper cuttings to detail the seamy side of the business. \u201cBehind every great fortune lies a great crime,\u201d Honor\u00e9 de Balzac wrote, and although Seabrook can\u2019t quite pin a big one on his family, he finds some nasty stuff. In 1934, CF and some henchmen violently broke a strike for higher pay by his farm workers and fired many of the Black employees, with the Ku Klux Klan massing in support nearby, he writes. <\/p>\n

Decades later, Jack Seabrook got involved in dubious consulting work, with payments made to a Swiss bank account and the details perhaps locked for ever in that hidden safe. Seabrook judges that his family left \u201ca legacy of cheating\u201d. <\/p>\n

The truth is more complex: even CF was, for the times, liberal about whom he employed, including interned Japanese Americans. They remained grateful to him long after his death and, as one local observed: \u201cJust because you are an alcoholic doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t run a company.\u201d<\/p>\n

The author acknowledges his conflicts: trying to expiate his guilt and take revenge on his grandfather while co-managing the $15mn family trust fund, for example. Still, he gives too little credit to the agricultural innovations of his forefathers\u2019 doomed enterprise. They did not buy spinach at a Brooklyn farmers\u2019 market; they raised it plentifully from the soil.<\/p>\n

The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by John Seabrook WW Norton & Co \u00a325\/$31.99, 368 pages <\/p>\n

John Gapper is the FT\u2019s chief UK business columnist<\/p>\n

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