EP 917 The Frozen Vegetable Family that Changed the Way We Eat

And you think your family has some great achievements and enough demerits to warrant a book?  Well, clearly, author and New Yorker writer, John Seabrook’s family, has all of that in triplicate and he spells it all out in the eminently readable “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.”  His grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, hailed as the “Henry Ford of Agriculture,” built an empire in the bean fields of southern New Jersey.  Seabrook Farms, which at its peak in the mid-1950’s grew a third of America’s frozen vegetables–and made his family wealthy, glamorous and powerful.  They literally drove the transition from horsepower to mechanized agriculture and pioneered quick-frozen food, which changed the nation’s eating habits.  However, there’s much more to this story which a grandson, John, captures in the book and on the podcast which might not put such a positive spotlight on his family.  Thanks to a box handed down to him by his father, he was able to recount the good and the bad and give us a remarkable picture of American innovation, wealth and some of the not so genteel ways fortunes are made.

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