Latest news with #JohnSeabrook
Wall Street Journal
30-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Spinach King' Review: It Runs in the Family
Back when New Jersey was manifestly a 'garden state,' Seabrook Farms, working day and night in floodlit fields, could produce a million peas in 24 hours. Charles F. Seabrook, its creator, was often called 'the Henry Ford of agriculture.' Mechanization and technology were his gods. Seabrook planted spinach, beets, cabbage, parsnips—but the secret sauce in what Life magazine obligingly dubbed 'the biggest vegetable factory on Earth' was his relentless instinct for improvement. C.F., as he was known, introduced irrigation to his field early in the 20th century, when neighbors were still relying on watering cans. He built roads and rail spurs to speed fresh romaine to city tables; he entered the American kitchen with frozen foods and dehydration. In 'The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty,' C.F.'s grandson, John Seabrook, a writer for the New Yorker, tackles the saga of his family's business in exposé style.
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A Memoir of Family Dysfunction Awash in Liquor and Leafy Greens
THE SPINACH KING: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, by John Seabrook When he was 14, John Seabrook's father — he shared the author's name but went by 'Jack' — was made the 'grader' at the family's enormous, industrialized farm in southern New Jersey. It was 1931 and Jack's own indomitable father, C.F., having failed at a contracting business, had returned to farming, his original profession, and had enlisted his offspring in the work; Jack's task was to determine the value of the company's peas, string beans and spinach. The job demanded discernment. While peas and string beans could be graded using calipers, the hearty green leaves of the spinach plant required an eye capable of judging 'color and crispness' and sensitive hands to feel how 'clean the crop was.' This anecdote sticks in the mind, anchoring one of two central figures in Seabrook's keen, sophisticated and appealing new book, 'The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.' A longtime New Yorker staff writer, Seabrook has been circling the book's central concerns — social class, various kinds of capital and aesthetic value — his entire career. His previous works, 'The Song Machine,' 'Flash of Genius,' 'Nobrow' and 'Deeper,' delve into the worlds of technology, music and science, but a through line remains visible. Here, Seabrook brings the ease and command of New Yorker-style reportage to bear on his own family. It's a shocking but juicy story, one he tells by harnessing his gift for quietly observing details that lesser writers would miss and then deploying them with the energy of a man who has skin in the game. The Seabrook family's saga in America (they are not the South Carolina Seabrooks) began in 1867, when the author's great-great-grandfather purchased 13 highly leveraged acres of 'scrubby wilderness' in Vineland, N.J. This was the start of the Seabrook farming enterprise, and by the early 20th century, the family had become a noted local purveyor of dairy, meat, and a broad assortment of fruits and vegetables. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
