Abstract
The cover of the New York Times Magazine on June 6, 1971, featured a photo of a seventy-two-year-old man in a dark suit and tie walking along the edge of the rich red-brown soils of a freshly plowed Pennsylvania farm feld. Chronicling the growing popularity of organic food, the article’s author described this gray-haired man with a bushy beard and dark glasses as the “guru” of a movement to transform the production and consumption of food in the United States. However, this organic “prophet” cut a peculiar fgure against the pastoral Pennsylvania landscape. Neither a farmer nor a scientist, he was a layman who hadoperated a manufacturing frm while also devoting his energy to convincing Americans that their health was bound to the soil and the quality of the food it produced. A publisher who had made millions on his contentious health claims, he had rarely worked with his own hands in the fertile soils that surrounded him.