Anyone who has in recent years shopped at Whole Foods Market—either in store or online via Amazon—has likely puzzled over how a company famous for promoting ethical food production and consumption could so fully embrace unbridled corporate capitalism. Yet this phenomenon, according to sociologist Laura J. Miller, should not be especially surprising. In fact, as she argues in Building Nature’s Market: The Business and Politics of Natural Foods, the natural foods movement—which she defines as encompassing such varied interests as vegetarianism, organic farming, naturopathy, and opposition to processed or genetically engineered food—has long overlapped with and often been driven by the natural foods industry. Miller objects to the popular narrative that, in the wake of 1960s counterculture, Whole Foods and its regional competitors, such as Sprouts and Fresh Thyme, corrupted and deradicalized an ideologically pure movement. By taking a longer view, reaching back to the antebellum period, Miller shows that commercial interests have persistently shaped and buoyed the advocacy of natural foods. In the end, it was the very success of these enterprises in courting new followers that reoriented the movement in the late twentieth century, transforming natural foods from a fringe ideology to a mainstream consumer choice.
Miller’s engaging account opens in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the natural foods movement was animated by religious concerns, notably a belief that eating plain, unadulterated, vegetarian fare brought one closer to nature and, in turn, God. Hallmarks of the lifestyle then included asceticism, self-reliance, and opposition to industrialized food production. Yet even in this era, the natural foods movement was deeply intertwined with commerce. Early leaders sold publications, promoted their lecture tours, and founded restaurants and boarding houses that served a natural foods diet. They also developed their own food products. In addition to imitation meats, egg substitutes, and coffee alternatives, natural foods entrepreneurs created several products of lasting popularity, including cornflakes, granola, and graham crackers (named after natural foods advocate Sylvester Graham). Although the history of these innovations may be familiar to some readers, Miller’s account differs by foregrounding the tensions they engendered within the natural foods movement as production increased. Processed “natural” foods not only drew their creators and consumers deeper into the capitalist marketplace they distrusted but also complicated the movement’s relationships to nature and industrialized food production. Nonetheless, as Miller points out, early entrepreneurs were hardly mere profiteers. Even if they bent certain ideals, they genuinely believed in the merits of natural foods, and their efforts expanded the movement’s base by making the lifestyle easier to attain.
The narrative then pivots to consider how a nineteenth-century religious fringe movement, often linked to the sick and elderly, acquired an increasingly broad and secular support base in the twentieth century. This shift takes off in earnest in the 1930s, Miller suggests, when two highly unusual groups—bodybuilders and Hollywood stars—embraced natural foods as a way to enhance their own physical appearances. Their backing helped to glamorize natural foods and distance the movement from its moralizing past. Later, in the 1960s, counterculturalists furthered the mainstreaming process, somewhat paradoxically, by adopting aspects of a natural foods diet as part of the era’s antiestablishment lifestyle politics. Along with Volkswagen buses and long hair, granola and organic produce came to symbolize a rejection of the status quo even as these choices grew in popularity. Throughout these periods of change, according to Miller, at least one constant remained—the involvement of commercial interests. Indeed, even at the height of countercultural anticapitalism, it was natural foods producers, distributors, and store owners who provided the institutional support that enabled the movement to weather attacks from the medical establishment and combat government raids and regulations. These industry efforts helped set the stage for the rapid growth of businesses such as Whole Foods in the late twentieth century.
Miller’s main objective in Building Nature’s Market is sociological, to explore the relationship between social movements and private enterprise. Here, the tight focus on natural foods works to her advantage, allowing her to illuminate in rich detail the many ways that industry sustained activism over the course of two centuries. Yet historians will likely be hungry for a bigger picture, for connections to broader historical trends and conversations. Widening the scope in this manner would have clarified the distinctiveness of the commercial ties uncovered by Miller. As an example, other nineteenth-century reform movements waded into capitalist waters, such as antislavery activists with their free-labor produce markets and best-selling fiction or temperance advocates with their tearooms and lecture circuits. Why, one wonders, did natural foods ultimately develop a more robust commercial orientation than these other movements? What set natural foods apart? Likewise, leaning on historical scholarship to flesh out broader economic and cultural contexts would have helped to explain why the natural foods movement was able to expand in certain moments and not others. For instance, the discussion of growing interest in physical culture and muscularity (which attracted bodybuilders to natural foods) would have benefited from engaging historians who have studied evolving constructs of masculinity in the early twentieth century, such as Gail Bederman, Kristin Hoganson, or Kevin P. Murphy, just as the author’s analysis of natural foods as an expression of countercultural identity would have been enriched by connecting to recent historical works on the vibrancy of other forms of politically motivated consumption in that era, from the denim of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers highlighted by Tanisha C. Ford to the head shops considered by Joshua Clark Davis to the antinuclear-testing milk boycotts studied by Thomas Jundt.
It is doubtless unfair to ask a sociologist to adopt a more historical approach. Moreover, even without doing so, Building Nature’s Market constitutes a valuable contribution to scholarly understanding of consumer politics. Miller’s analysis carefully untangles the threads that bound commerce and conviction together within the natural foods movement and, ultimately, demonstrates how this comingling helped transform an unconventional religious ideology into yet another consumer choice that Americans could adopt or discard at will.
