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  • Minding the Natural: Cultural Roots of Back-to-Nature Movements
  • Kendra Smith-Howard (bio)
Jessica Martucci, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 292pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $35.00.
Robin O’Sullivan. American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping, and Eating. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2015. 382pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.
Barbara Katz Rothman. A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 252pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00.

Breastfeeding. Organic farming. Home birth. In the twentieth century, activists endorsing these processes used the same term to describe them: “natural.” The works of Jessica Martucci, Robin O’Sullivan, and Barbara Katz Rothman collectively demonstrate how profoundly cultural and political the pursuit of “natural” food and “natural” childbirth really were. By exposing the cultural underpinnings of alternative practices for childbirth and food provisioning, the authors help explain why social movements for these alternative practices bubbled up even as chemical pesticides and herbicides, formula feeding, and hospital births predominated in American culture at large.

Robin O’Sullivan’s American Organic recognizes the diversity of individuals who gardened and farmed under the umbrella of “organic farming” and tracks schisms and disputes that emerged between them from the 1940s to the present. American Organic begins by examining J. I. Rodale’s life and work in the 1940s—tracing the roots of the organic movement back further than widely read works on the rise of organics, such as Warren Belasco’s Appetite for Change (rev.ed., 2006) or Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). Moving beyond Rodale, the author examines homesteading in the wake of Silent Spring in the 1970s, the organic movement’s reaction to the Organic Food Production Act of 1990, and the shifting array of food businesses marketing organic foods from the 1990s to the present. O’Sullivan’s approach to organic agriculture [End Page 362] is broad, rather than deep, rarely referencing the intellectual work of organic farming scholars like Jordan Kleiman and Andrew Case, David Shi and Jeffrey Filpiliak, Brian Obach and Julie Guthman. But her book’s contribution is in airing and considering the kinds of claims about organic foods that resonated with consumers, particularly in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Admirable in its scope, reading American Organic is a bit like encountering an overgrown garden patch in which perennials, weeds, and annuals compete for attention. The author discusses the organic movement in highly individualized and impressionistic terms—profiling a rich cast of colorful characters who promoted organic farming. She includes not just well-known individuals such as Albert Howard, J. I. Rodale, and Rachel Carson, but also off-beat ones like Bert “Gypsy Boots” Bootzin. As the book moves forward in time, the number of organic-movement intellectuals multiplies, but O’Sullivan does little to explain or identify which ones had the largest influence, what the relationships were between them, or how the cast of characters in one era differed from the next. Narrating some of the most important controversies in organic agriculture, rarely does she present individuals profiled within these shifting controversies. Hence, the reader is left to make sense of the contours of the unruly garden.

Jessica Martucci’s Back to the Breast, like American Organic, examines an alternative practice of food provisioning—breastfeeding—during a time in which feeding infants formula was the norm. Whereas historians like Rima Apple and Jacqueline Wolf have identified the rise of formula feeding in the Progressive Era, and others (including Barbara Katz Rothman) have traced the resurrection of breastfeeding in the 1970s, Martucci centers much of her attention on the decades at mid-century in which actual practices of breastfeeding reached their nadir. It was in the 1940s and 1950s, she argues, that the intellectual underpinnings of the natural-motherhood movement emerged, laying the groundwork for the resurrection of breastfeeding in the late twentieth century. The author credits the work of psychologists, anthropologists, and ethologists of the 1940s and 1950s for identifying the importance of maternal attention to infants’ psychological and physical well-being, thus legitimizing breastfeeding...

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