Lifestyle Sports: Latest from Food Politics: Weekend reading: The Spinach King

By Marion Nestle

January 23 2026

Weekend reading: The Spinach King

John Seabrook. The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Norton, 2025 (346 pages).

This book is a memoir by New Yorker staff writer, John Seabrook, about his rich, unscrupulous, and bigoted grandfather and father but there is so much food politics in it that it belongs on my must-read list. It’s also a riveting story, well told.

Seabrook’s progenitors were notable for having figured out how to grow vegetables at a huge scale in southern New Jersey, and how to freeze them so they could be shipped, stored, and sold ast great profit. Until things went bad, they were the largest vegetable growers on the eastern seabord, if not anywhere. This book has plenty to say about how they did it—bought seed, planted, harvested, froze, shipped.

It is also about who did the work and how the worker were treated—farm labor as viewed from the owners’ perspective (unshared by the author, who is unsparing in his reporting).

I learned a lot about industrial vegetable farming from reading this book.

C.F. [Seabrook’s grandfather] could not have chosen a better time to build his vegetable factory. Food prices, already rising in 2013, were further boosted by the outbreak of war in Europe, causing agricultural production abroad to contract severely. The price of a bushel of corn in Minnesota rose from 59 cents in 1914 to $1.30 in 1919. Wheat went from $1.05 a bushel to $2.34. Mechanization was bringing tractors, threshers, seed drillers, and combine harvesters to the cultivation of wheat, rye, oats, and barley, greatly increasing production. Land prices rose accordingly. (p.79)

I looked up today’s figures: Corn is $4.50 per bushel; wheat $5 to $6. No wonder our agricultural production system is such a mess and requires so much in subsidies.

The Seabrooks of that era were ungenerous with their workers, particularly those who were Black, and had to deal with a strike in 1934.

Eyewitnesses…claimed the Seabrooks and their henchman crushed the strike using fire hoses, tear gas, mass arrests, and imported gangster named Red Sanders, armed vigilantes, and the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, who spread terror by burning crosses in front of Black Workers’ homes. One ACLU observer reported seeing my uncle Belford, of whom I had only fond memories, leading a tear-gas attack on a striking worker’s house and setting it on fire with a woman and small children inside. (p. 109)

This must have been one tough book to write. Seabrook says it took him 30 years to dig out the history of his complicated family and come to terms with it. He did a great job. It’s a great read.

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