Unlike the untimely deaths of other health gurus, Rodale’s passing hardly shook confi dence in his ideas. In large part this was because or-ganic farming and natural foods were already leaving behind the world of faddism and making inroads into the mainstream. Indeed, by the time of his death, Prevention magazine, with its natural foods message, was al-ready selling 1 million copies a month.⁴¹
In the years that followed, changes in American political culture helped make middle-class Americans even more amenable to natu-ral foods. Confi dence in the kind of collective, government-sponsored solutions to problems that had characterized the Progressive Era, New Deal, and most recently President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society faded rapidly in the 1970s. The kind of faith that had accompanied the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the two Food and Drug acts now seemed
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quaint and naive. Once again, the competing tradition, which mistrusted government and held individuals responsible for creating and solving their own problems, came to the fore. Ironically, although these att itudes were soon associated with neo-conservatism, they also owed much to the long-haired rebels of the counterculture who, like their Romantic pre-decessors in the nineteenth century, saw salvation and good health as coming from individual dietary change. Although “hippies” no longer roamed the streets, their reverence for the “natural,” including in foods, was taken up, along with their tastes in music and clothes, by many in the mainstream middle class. These soon became commercialized and, shorn of their original anti-establishment goals, were promoted by ex-actly the kind of large corporations they were originally designed to oppose.
The trajectory followed by the Rodale enterprise was not dissimilar.
At fi rst, Robert Rodale maintained his publications’ anti-scientifi establishment posture. Commenting on his father’s death, he praised his legacy of questioning people’s faith in science. “You must look at na-ture and see what lessons she teaches,” he wrote, “not just blindly use all the new chemicals that are given to us by white-coated technicians.”⁴² In May 1974 Prevention att ributed Hunza longevity to the fact that, un-like Westerners, the foods in their diet were extremely high in “nitrolo-sides,” a nutrient present in apricots that, under its other name, laetrile, was being touted by dubious practitioners of “alterative” medicine as a cure for cancer. The magazine also continued to delight in taking pot shots at orthodox medical advice about food. A piece on constipation, for example, told of how since the 1950s doctors had recommended fi rst psychotherapy, then antibiotics, and then laxatives to cure constipation, whereas folk wisdom (that is, Prevention) had correctly advised eating natural foods with roughage, something that was still not endorsed by orthodox medicine.⁴³
Increasingly, though, Prevention mustered conventional science in support of folk wisdom. That same year, in 1974, it cited the prominent scientists Jean Mayer and John Yudkin to support its att ack on the FDA for saying that there was no proof that diet aff ected heart disease. “Hun-dreds” of studies, it said, “lead to the overwhelming conclusion that a diet which is as close as possible to that eaten by people living in close harmony with the soil . . . may well aff ord a valuable degree of protection against heart trouble.” It also called the FDA’s claim that modern food-processing techniques did not aff ect the nutritional quality of food a
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diculous myth,” citing scientifi c studies showing that heating and other forms of cooking reduced the vitamin content of many foods.⁴⁴
That Prevention was able to refer to “hundreds” of articles on the diets of people “living close to the soil” was a sign of a profound change tak-ing place in mainstream science: the kind of respect for the folk wisdom of traditional people that underlay Hunzaphilia was no longer confi ned to faddists and the counterculture. In 1973 Scientifi c American, National Geographic, and Nutrition Today all published articles by Alexander Leaf, a professor of gerontology at Harvard Medical School, on how living the simple life had endowed the Hunza as well as two other isolated groups, in the high Andes and Russian Georgia, with extraordinary longevity.⁴⁵ Leading medical and scientifi c researchers were now labeling heart dis-ease, cancer, and other chronic illnesses as “diseases of civilization.” Like the Rodales, they were now able to ascribe the apparent absence of these ailments among remote people to whatever dietary hobbyhorse they were riding. As a result, Robert Rodale was now able to do such things as back up his claim that fi ber cured heart disease with a study of Ugandans in the well-respected American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.⁴⁶ Indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, a study of heart disease and the diet among poor Cretan peasants was already leading to wholesale changes in American eating habits.
With a plethora of other premodern examples now at hand, refer-ences to the Hunza tailed off . Robert Rodale himself traveled to many Third World countries, reporting back on the connections he found be-tween traditional agriculture, unprocessed foods, and healthy living.⁴⁷ In 1973 he had returned from China, where Mao Tse-tung’s primitive (and, it was later revealed, disastrous) agricultural ideas still reigned, and told of how ancient farming techniques were producing healthful foods and creating a model for sustainable agriculture.⁴⁸ The following year he told of how American Indians had been making his favorite corn cakes—“a miracle food”—for thousands of years. They were the product, he said, of years of trial and error and, most important, common sense: the very thing that was the basis of Chinese herbal medicine.⁴⁹ In America, on the other hand, food production was “in the hands of corporate farm-ers and giant processing companies, [whose] standardized, chemically-treated products” were a “threat to health.”⁵⁰
However, the syndicated weekly column that Rodale wrote for such mainstream newspapers as the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post from 1971 to 1975 was much less radical-sounding.⁵¹ Indeed, many of
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his recommendations would soon become mainstream. He rejected the idea, prevalent in the 1960s, that vigorous exercise was bad for the heart and suggested regular exercise to avoid “heart pollution.” (This led, in the 1980s, to his company founding the very profi table magazines Run-ner’s World and Men’s Health.) He was one of the fi rst “locavores,” advocat-ing eatadvocat-ing locally because of the amount of energy wasted in importadvocat-ing foods from afar. He also condemned excess food packaging for wasting energy and unnecessarily fi lling dump sites. He defi ed the large chorus condemning saturated fats by recommending free-range eggs as “a nat-urally good convenience food.” Such sensible-sounding blends of con-cerns for health, taste, and the environment contributed signifi cantly to mainstream acceptance of natural and organic foods. A 1978 profi le of him in the New York Times portrayed him as much as a concerned envi-ronmentalist as a health food advocate and pointedly avoided labeling him a faddist.⁵²
By then, the Rodales’ batt le to make Americans fearful of chemical food additives was well on its way to being won. Already in 1977 a ma-jority of Americans surveyed thought that “natural foods,” which they understood to mean foods that were free of chemical additives, were safer and more healthful than others. Food processors were now call-ing everythcall-ing from potato chips and breakfast cereals to butt er and beer “Natural,” “Nature’s Own,” and “Nature Valley.” Many claimed to be “additive free,” without saying what was meant by additives. A study of food ads in women’s magazines in 1977 showed that more than a quarter of the products were promoted as “natural,” even though only 2 percent of the products could in any way be defi ned as “health foods.”⁵³