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

of America was maturing was that people had begun to take their baked potatoes with sour cream instead of sweet butter.
    â€œThey were Marco Polo type of guys,” Reich says. “They were definitely in the entertainment business.” One year Reese had overstock of its Spooky Foods gift set—chocolate-covered ants, bees, grasshoppers, and caterpillars—so it hired Bela Lugosi to appear in his Dracula costume with the product, which promptly sold out. Alienation was part of the appeal. Reich, who still works in the food business, considered Ries a mentor and an example; the month that
Jaws
opened in theaters Reich hawked shark-meat pâté wearing a scuba suit and took out an advertisement that read, “This is your chance to bite back.”
    One of Ries’s most valued employees was Morris Kushner, a former writer on Groucho Marx’s
This Is Your Life
, who started as a West Coast representative and rose to company president. He lived in the guest quarters of a sprawling mansion in Encino and was married to Naudjia de Morozova, a thin, flamboyant woman who dressed in fur, claimed to be a Russian countess, and ate little besides chocolate. Kushner, who wore checked suits, a tweed trilby, and a moustache, was from Nebraska. His pedigree in food was long: his uncle was a grocer in Lincoln, and Kushner apprenticed with him in his youth. After the war, he worked for a wholesaler in Los Angeles that supplied Hollywood with chutney, caviar, and foie gras. In a book on the industry, he boasted of having been one of the first to bring smoked oysters from Japan to the United States, as part of General MacArthur’s plan to revive the Japanese economy by appealing to American hostesses.
    â€œI set out to design our private label and felt that I needed something other than merely the words ‘Smoked Oysters,’” Kushner wrote. The one other similar product available at the time was a crabapple smoked oyster from the Pacific Northwest. “I searched through Japanese literature and history books. . . . From
Madame Butterfly
and the Cherry Blossom Festival, I assumed that Japan had an abundance of cherry trees, so I labeled our product ‘Cherrywood Smoked Oysters.’” When he later met with the president of the Smoked Oyster Association in Hiroshima, he learned that the Japanese had been flummoxed by his first order, and had gone out in search of precious cherrywood to authenticate the label’s claim. “Needless to say, that was the only time cherrywood was ever used in that manner, and subsequent orders were smoked with the cheaper kindling scrap wood.” But, he concluded proudly, “cherrywood smoked” became the industry standard. “I relate this little tale to illustrate how a product can be upgraded in the eyes of the beholder with a little label imagery.”
    The successful food seller was part carnival barker, part con man. If an item wasn’t moving, Kushner’s advice was to mark it up: a $75 jar of truffles is more intriguing than the same jar for $45. Another rule of thumb: “The food broker must never lie to a buyer, or better yet, never get caught lying.” In the mid-forties, when most specialty-foods dealers were trying to keep their products
out
of supermarkets for fear that mass marketing and availability would destroy their mystique (and their profit margins), he persuaded a Southern California grocery store to designate a gourmet section. They called the improvised area—a plywood shelf resting on large, foil-wrapped juice cans—“the importation center,” because most of the items came from abroad. By 1970, the Safeway in Washington, D.C., stocked nearly five thousand gourmet items, among them staples of the Reese line like rattlesnake, kangaroo, and Bengal tiger meat. They may not have been a large part of the business, but they served a purpose: “shelf-warmers” tended to start selling