Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear Read Free Book Online Page A

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    R ies, an outsider and a self-reinventor, helped create a taste for the freaky in a society devoted to beefsteak, glamorizing the seemingly repulsive and making it into a symbol of elegance. After a lucrative career as a textile manufacturer in Germany, he arrived in Chicago in 1939 and started selling imported European cheeses out of the back of a station wagon on Route 41, store by store. Soon he employed a brigade of German-Jewish refugees to go on the road for him. They drove all day and for dinner ate canned peaches and ice cream. Within a few years, Ries had diversified: an early price list shows Norwegian goat cheese, Bahamian mustard, chow mein noodles, Cuban rock lobster, and Hawaiian Punch.
    Ries was dashing; slim and refined, he wore handmade suits and twirled—never chewed—his cigars. In order to make his company sound more “American,” he called it Reese Finer Foods. He developed new foods—baby corn, blue-cheese salad dressing, shelf-stable croutons—and sold them alongside other then-exotic fare like water chestnuts. When a shipment of artichokes arrived in rusty, dented cans, Ries packed them in glass with vinaigrette, and called them marinated artichokes. He couldn’t boil water, according to his son, but he had a flair for presentation. Reese Finer Foods helped introduce teriyaki sauce to the United States by attaching a Japanese yen coin to every bottle sold (“Gives you a yen for Oriental food”); their barbecue sauce came with a whisk attached. In 1958, the
Los Angeles Evening Herald Express
announced, “Something wonderful has happened and no longer do you need ever again to get garlic on your finger tips!” Reese had invented roll-on garlic oil.
    While other importers looked mainly to Europe, Ries sought unfamiliar snacks in Asia and Latin America. He brought tinned sparrows and French-fried grasshoppers from Japan, and ants from Bogotá. The Illinois candy-maker he hired to cover the ants with chocolate is said to have called Ries in a panic when the 500-pound shipment arrived; workers were threatening to quit the line. Once a year, Ries and his employees went to Asia to look for products and ideas. Reese sold tinned lion, tiger, elephant, and whale; pickled rooster combs, espresso, Lindt chocolate; Canadian muskrat, reindeer steaks from Lapland, and diamondbacks from Ross Allen, a snake-wrestling celebrity herpetologist with a ranch in Florida.
    Ancient Romans sold the meat of exotic, imported panthers, hippos, lions, and giraffes killed in death matches at the circus; Reese did the modern equivalent, tinning creatures culled from zoos. “The zoos would furnish lists of animals they had to dispose of,” an employee later told a newspaper reporter. “Reese would buy a carcass at a high price and give it, frozen, to a cannery for processing.” When Ries went to a stock show in Chicago and noticed that no one was bidding on the bison—not then considered food—he bought the whole lot for forty cents a pound, and canned the meat with wine. “He took great food that nobody knew they wanted and got them to buy it,” Stewart Reich, Ries’s great-nephew, told me. “Max—I don’t want to say he churned it out, but he had a supply line and discovered the soft part of the market and exploited it.” At a “Fashion Show of Foods” Ries put on in Milwaukee in the mid-fifties, he said, “Eating habits are in the mind.”
    As early as 1965, Ries predicted the foodie movement, and its turn toward the more inclusive, inventive cuisines of Latin America and Asia. “More people today can afford more of the so-called ‘exotic’ foods which previously were available only to persons of great wealth,” he said. “With this increased affluence has also come a new spirit of adventure about eating.” His evidence that the babyish palate