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 claimed. Polling that year showed that nearly three-quarters of Americans attributed the primary responsibility for environmental problems to business (p. 225). Corporations responded forcefully with a public relations counteroffensive, as seen in 289 pages of advertisements by twenty-seven companies in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week proudly proclaiming their concern for the environment in 1970 (p. 224). President Nixon responded to these growing pressures by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Congress passed a series of major federal bills, including the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. Jundt, nonetheless, regretfully agrees with one activist who argued that such legislation was “only as good as the people who enforced it” (p. 215) because of indifferent and hostile regulators.

Greening the Red, White, and Blue convincingly shows that “consumption proved more liberatory than traditional electoral politics” to many environmental activists (p. 228). Surveys revealed that only 8 percent of Earth Day protestors vowed to take further collective action to protect the environment, but 40 percent pledged to change how and what they consumed for the sake of the environment (p. 219). A burgeoning retail trade in organic and natural foods and the popularity of publications such as The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News signaled consumers’ growing desire for environmental sustainability.

Although Earth Day was the largest ever public show of support for environmentalism—and perhaps even the largest protest of any kind in the Vietnam era—Americans from the 1970s onward showed declining faith in their government to implement fundamental, far-reaching environmental reforms. Even considering government inaction and outsized corporate power, however, it remains unclear why environmentalists so quickly discounted protest in favor of individual action in the marketplace. A comparison to feminists and anti-war activists—who embraced mass protest in the first half of the 1970s against seemingly unyielding government officials—might have allowed Jundt to explain more concretely why environmentalists were so skeptical of traditional protest politics.

Although Jundt has good reason to focus on consumers, environmentally motivated producers and retailers could have benefited from more careful analysis. Instead, businesspeople—even when they also identify as consumers—often appear as abstractions or are entirely invisible in Greening the Red, White, and Blue. Most founders of organic grocery stores, for instance, were themselves organic consumers who started businesses because they could not purchase the food they wanted. Jundt is also right to argue that Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming was a beacon for environmentally minded consumers. Still, a survey of any issue of the magazine from the 1950s and 1960s reveals a greater emphasis on self-reliant, independent agricultural production than on any alternative ethos of consumption.

Nonetheless, Jundt’s work represents a major, path-breaking advance in our historical understanding of American critics of consumer capitalism, joining the ranks of works by Daniel Horowitz, Lawrence Glickman, and the more environmentally focused works mentioned earlier in this review. Amid a revived interest in scholarship on the history of capitalism, Greening the Red, White, and Blue stands out as one of the best works yet to investigate the American left’s response to consumer culture in the postwar era.

Joe Dobrow’s Natural Prophets, by contrast, examines how organic and natural food companies “became a bellwether of the late 20th century shift toward more enlightened business attitudes” (p. ix) as they sought to protect “the triple bottom line”—namely, “people, planet, and profit” (p. 168). Unlike Jundt, Dobrow dismisses the natural foods marketplace in the 1960s and 1970s as a “sprinkling of dreary health food stores across the country … [that offered] a laughably small selection of wheat germ, tofu, brown rice, and other products that were decidedly lacking in mainstream tastes” (p. ix). Natural Prophets’ primary focus is rather on the 1980s and 1990s, when organic foods became a multibillion-dollar business that attracted significant corporate investment. Small independent companies such as Celestial Seasonings, Cascadian Farm, and Stonyfield Farm considerably broadened the consumer base for organics, first with products that sold briskly in traditional supermarkets and later when they became subsidiaries of much larger conglomerates such as Kraft, General Mills, and Groupe Danone. Dobrow also looks closely at the companies that waged fierce battles for organic retail supremacy from the early 1990s until 2007, when Whole Foods Market concluded a fifteen-year buying spree of ten competitors, including the natural foods supermarkets Fresh Fields and Wild Oats.

More than any other company, Whole Foods transformed the organic food business from an assortment of independent retailers to a marketplace dominated by national chains. John Mackey and Renee Lawson Hardy, the company’s founders, first tried their hands in organic retail with a small shop they operated from 1978 to 1980 called SaferWay, a business whose very name criticized the dangers of corporate power. After closing that store to open Whole Foods in 1980, the company grew to eight locations in three states, with sales approaching $50 million by the end of the decade. Then, in 1992, Whole Foods made an initial public offering on NASDAQ, likely becoming the first “green business,” and certainly the first natural food store, to go public. Unlike most natural food sellers, Whole Foods had access to significant venture capital early in its history and could expand rapidly, growing to forty-three locations in ten states by 1996.

Despite his extensive investigation of Whole Foods, however, Dobrow fails to mention one of the company’s central principles—namely, its resolute opposition to organized labor. This hostility to unions played out most vividly in the company’s bitter, protracted dispute with a United Food and Commercial Workers local in Berkeley in the early 1990s, when Whole Foods stores across the country gave out free copies of a nineteen-page anti-union screed authored by Mackey that quoted Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises. To date, the employees of only one Whole Foods—in Madison, Wisconsin—have successfully formed a union. In overlooking this key dimension of Whole Foods’ business strategy, Dobrow misses a critical opportunity to discuss the company’s economic and philosophical departure from many of its natural foods’ forerunners.

A former head of marketing for Whole Foods Market and Fresh Fields, Dobrow displays an intimate knowledge of the leaders and inner working of the organic food business, and the extensive interviews he conducted for Natural Prophets represent the book’s greatest strength. Dobrow’s proximity to his subject matter, however, results in frequent, unreflective praise that undermines the work’s value as a historical account. At times, his breathless celebration of the natural food business strains the limits of credulity. A prime example is his claim that the “newly transparent business world” created by natural foods “has held off the inexorable advances of Big Food and agribusiness; rewritten the agenda for health, diet, and sustainability; and … proven to be more influential on attitudes, consumer and business behavior, and the health of the planet, than any other industry in our lifetime” (p. 268).

In addition, a vexing question remains unanswered by both Jundt’s and Dobrow’s works—that is, are self-proclaimed green businesses such as Whole Foods sincerely interested in the environmental movement’s original, broader mission of restructuring economic power relations, both between workers and management and between corporations and the American political system? Dobrow steadfastly avoids these questions, taking at face value natural food businesses claims’ of “conscious capitalism,” a slogan that inspired a 2013 book by John Mackey. Jundt, however, addresses these questions in his conclusion: “If green consumption has been revolutionary,” he concedes, “it has been a revolution whose benefits have been disproportionately enjoyed by those who are able to afford it” (p. 238). However, Jundt’s claims that “every purchase of natural, organic products by citizens is an act of resistance” (p. 242) seem questionable, considering that the two of the largest sellers of those products are Whole Foods, which Jundt describes as thoroughly neoliberal (p. 235), and Walmart, the world’s largest private employer.

One might also take issue with Jundt’s claim that environmentalists have lost interest in “taking to the streets [because while it] may work to bring about some social change … it will do little, if anything, to alter economic and political power” (p. 240). The hundreds of thousands of people who have participated in the March against Monsanto movement that started in 2013 and the massive protests for increased climate change regulation in September 2014 suggest otherwise. Granted, it remains to be seen whether those demonstrations will have any discernible effect on policy makers. Along with the recent book by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, these movements suggest that activists still value environmental protest as a tool for challenging corporate behavior and governmental neglect. In recent years, activists have also protested directly against Whole Foods—for instance, for requiring employees to work on Thanksgiving, for selling rabbit meat, and for not labeling genetically modified foods. Perhaps in our current moment, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s endorsement of corporate personhood, citizens are discovering that they must directly confront even self-styled conscious capitalists to secure true environmental justice in the marketplace.