Although both spinach and king are proudly emblazoned across the cover, The Spinach King is far more concerned with the whims of the king than the needs of the spinach. The royals in question are the patriarchs of the Seabrook clan, who lorded over Seabrook Farm of Upper Deerfield Township of deep south New Jersey from 1893 to 1959. These men also happen to be the father and grandfather of the author, the New Yorker writer John Seabrook.

The dominant figure in the narrative is one C.F. Seabrook (1881–1964), a second-generation farmer who earned the moniker of the “Henry Ford of Agriculture” thanks to his early investments in industrial agricultural production. At first glance, Seabrook Farm’s tremendous success appeared to be primarily the result of these entrepreneurial instincts; C.F. is credited with being the first to lay irrigation systems in New Jersey and was an early investor in frozen foods. These products, in turn, were picked, processed, and packed by an international and multi-racial group of workers who, as the nostalgia-washed version of the story goes, built better lives in their company town thanks to Seabrook’s thriving business. By the end of World War II, thanks to workers and owners alike, the company was packing an estimated 40% of the United States’ frozen spinach and would soon be a household name in frozen dinners. (Creamed spinach was their signature product.)

But as the author looks deeper into his own family’s past, a more troubled picture of life on the farm begins to emerge, one where engineering feats are intermingled with long hours, low pay, violent strikes, and virulent racism. C.F. too is toppled from his entrepreneurial pedestal, as the author openly discusses his grandfather’s raging antisemitism, repeated harassment of women, and unabashed graft. As the theme of fathers and sons is a central one in the book, the next generation Seabrook, the author’s father Jack, gets the same treatment, with his skills in marketing and networking laid bare beside his ostentatious lifestyle, supremacist beliefs, and unabashed use of company funds for his expensive horse-drawn coach habit. For the Seabrooks, selfishness and cheating appear to be as central to their success as knowing how to farm.

It should be noted that the author is a journalist and not a historian. His aim in writing this story is to uncover more about his own family’s past, and his thesis appears to be that much of what he personally grapples with today can be traced to the sins of the father and of his father before that. And in telling this intergenerational story from a personal perspective, he does a tremendous job; the book is very well-written, engaging, and dare I say, a bit juicy, which fits well with its intended popular audience.

As a historical text for business historians, however, its uses are less evident. To build the Spinach King, John Seabrook relied on a rich collection of personal family records, which he has mined for many fascinating and alternatively glamorous and gory details about the family’s glittering agrarian life. (Hundreds of bespoke suits and his father’s flings with the likes of Eva Gabor are repeated themes.) Unfortunately for historians looking to write their own histories that incorporate the Seabrook story, most of these archives remain in private hands. They are also not thoroughly cited in the book’s endnotes, which makes it hard to understand the nature of evidence Seabrook is using to build his narrative.

Although I am sure the author would not call his grandfather a great man, the narrative he builds with these sources is a great man’s history, one where the fate of the business is determined by the whims and moods of a single, all-powerful individual. As a result, the personal focus tends to over-emphasize the role of personal decisions in the rapid and dramatic changes sweeping through American food production during this period. There is little concrete discussion of the structural forces, beyond connections in the jungle of New Jersey politics and a lack of personal morals in exploiting them, that might enable a man like C.F. to amass so much land and influence.

The Depression-era labor strikes that sit at the narrative heart of the book too feel they are lonely islands in a period that was defined by agricultural strife. The details the author writes about, including intimidation by the KKK and threats against women and children, are certainly shocking, but they are also unfortunately well familiar to anyone who has read the literature on the history of farm labor.

While there are commendable nods to the broader context his family’s story sits in, making connections to them is not the author’s primary aim. He wants to tell his family history as he sees it, alcoholic warts and all. Business historians should therefore take the book as it is: a rich and pulpy family history that adds a fat layer of humanity, both at its best and at its worst, over the broader story of the rise of agribusiness in the United States.