Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America by Thomas Jundt, and: Natural Prophets: From Health Foods to Whole Foods—How the Pioneers of the Industry Changed the Way We Eat and Reshaped American Business by Joe Dobrow (review)

In 2014, Whole Foods Market was the eighth biggest grocery chain and thirty-second largest retailer of any kind in the United States. Although almost every company in the twenty-first century claims to be “green,” Whole Foods, as it is widely known, is the largest retail chain in America to embrace environmental sustainability since its founding. As such, it is fitting that the company appears on the first pages of two very different books—Thomas Jundt’s Greening the Red, White, and Blue and Joe Dobrow’s Natural Prophets—as a symbol of the promise of sustainable corporate practice. With clear prose and careful research, Jundt’s monograph investigates the rise of environmental activists and an “underground world of green consumption” (p. 228) from 1945 until the early 1970s. Dobrow’s work, meanwhile, represents a narrative history of natural food stores’ entry into the mainstream of American retailing from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Both titles contribute to a historical literature on environmentally informed businesses, a topic of study initially pioneered by Warren Belasco and Craig Cox that has attracted considerable interest in the past decade from such scholars and journalists as Fred Turner, Andrew Kirk, Anne Knupfer, Julie Guthman, Michael Pollan, and Samuel Fromartz.

At its core, Jundt’s work explains the forgotten yet “significant origins of environmentalism as a moral and intellectual broadside against the growing power of corporate capitalism” (p. 2). To Jundt, the environmental movement that arose from 1945 to 1970 sought to reduce pollution and protect natural resources as part of a much broader challenge to corporations’ outsized influence in American political and social life. This distinguished environmentalism from the conservationist movement of the first half of the twentieth century, which focused almost exclusively on preserving natural landscapes for recreational use. In short, Greening the Red, White, and Blue represents a much-needed rethinking of the relationship between the environmental movement and business in the quarter-century immediately following World War II.

Most importantly, Jundt identifies the origins of postwar American environmentalism not in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, but in the environmental consumer subcultures and concerns about the biological consequences of nuclear weapons that grew rapidly from 1945 until the early 1960s. Although the anti-nuclear activists of those years may be best remembered as pacifists, Jundt shows them to be just as concerned with the environmental effects of nuclear fallout and radioactivity as they were with peace. Groups such as Women Strike for Peace (WSP), for instance, organized a nationally coordinated demonstration of 50,000 women against nuclear testing as well as a boycott of milk thought to be contaminated by the radioactive isotope strontium-90 in 1961. That year, in fact, Americans reduced their consumption of milk by more than 300,000 quarts (pp. 143–145). Meanwhile, the growing popularity of J. I. Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming magazine, which claimed well over 100,000 subscribers by the start of the 1960s, signaled consumers’ deep interest in alternatives to the pesticides and mass production embraced by the food industry.

Those developments, along with increased activism against DDT, pollution, and oil spills in the 1960s, laid the groundwork for Earth Day in 1970. The demonstrations of April 22, 1970 by 20 million Americans reflected the work of an environmental movement decades in the making—not the debut of the newest social protest cause to sweep the country, as some news media...