THE NATURAL

(continued from p. 83) tions. It’s important to remember what most Americans valued in the 1950s: DDT, which had been used during World War II to control the insect carriers of malaria and typhus, was promoted now as a pesticide for all those new lawns and for farms as well. Processed foods were overtaking fresh foods from the farm faster than crabgrass. Organic farming was considered un-American, maybe even Communist.

In that climate, Rachel Carson also came knocking on Beatrice’s door, also unannounced, in the late 1950s, before the publication of Silent Spring. “I was very much involved with the pesticide problem at the time,” Beatrice explains, “and when I was speaking before garden clubs, I found that they really didn’t want to hear about pesticides—they wanted to know what to do instead. So I began gathering information for a book I called Gardening Without Poisons. I was also writing letters to the editor of the Boston Herald on the problem with pesticides.” A friend of Carson’s clipped the letters and sent them to her at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Soon after, Rachel Carson and Beatrice, two diminutive Atlases against these giant corporations, became correspondents.

Rachel Carson wrote to Beatrice in January 1958: “She said that she found my material very interesting. And then she wrote, ‘I’m sure I could find the documentation of what you have been writing but it would be much easier and quicker if you could supply them to me.’” Beatrice sat down and the next day sent back an eight-page, typewritten, single-spaced letter to Rachel Carson, listing 75 sources on the dangers of DDT and chlordane—a Google listing before there was Google.

“Carson was struggling with cancer at the time,” Beatrice recalls, “but she didn’t want that known publicly, so she got a wig, and then her book came out in 1962. She was interviewed on CBS; I still remember the reporter. He starts off with something like ‘Are you the little woman who has created all this fury?’ You know, condescend- ing. Later they wanted to present both sides, since many of their sponsors were chemical companies. So they brought in the head of research at American Cyanimide. He looked fierce, like the Grand Inquisitor sitting opposite this very pleasant, gentle-looking lady in the wig. He was nasty and aggressive, and she simply sat there, very calmly, giving the facts. In the end, she won hands-down because he became the ‘hysterical woman’ and she was the voice of reason.”

Rachel Carson died in 1964 at the age of 60. Adelle Davis died 10 years later at the age of 70. Beatrice is still here to process this time of turmoil in American life, when a curtain opened the use of antibiotics with farm animals, these are all much bigger than before and very formidable.”

Beatrice is only ahead of the wave in her thinking and in her writing. Otherwise, she is considerably backward: She owns neither a computer nor a cell phone nor any other “newfangled” devices. She finally had a hand-medown phone installed in the 1980s; it’s concealed inside a cabinet at the bottom of her stairs. She relies on handwritten correspondence to keep up with her friends, who live far and wide. “People call me a Luddite,” she notes, “but that makes me feel proud.” and people realized that toxic chemicals were taking a toll on people and nature. “Our consciousness was raised,” Beatrice concludes.

In 2008, Beatrice resided for several months in an assisted-living facility. “I was sick and didn’t think I was going to make it,” she explains. Having learned a lesson from Lotte, who never threw anything away and left Beatrice to deal with all her weighty possessions, she got rid of most of what she owned, including her books and cameras: “I gave them all away. Fortunately, I didn’t sell my house.” She recovered and returned to her home.

Beatrice Trum Hunter’s The Natural Foods Cookbook was published by Simon & Schuster in 1961, the very first natural foods cookbook published in this country. She based a lot of it on her cooking for those summer guests. In 1964, Houghton Mifflin published Gardening Without Poisons, which had first been published in 1961 by a group of gardening enthusiasts. “I’ve always felt that I’ve been before the wave,” she says now, sitting in her spartan home. “I never thought I’d live to see supermarkets with whole foods. I’m amazed at the number of people who have written to me to tell me how I’ve changed their lives.

“So in that way, it’s great, but in the other way, the industrialized approach to agriculture, monoculture, GMOs [genetically modified organisms], and

Beatrice’s voluminous correspondence, including that with Adelle Davis and Rachel Carson, is contained in 43 cartons on file at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in the Mugar Library at Boston University. When I went to explore some of those letters, the groaning cardboard boxes were wheeled in to me on steel carts. Each year, Beatrice continues to add boxes to the collection. All her books, many now hard to find, are in the collection at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Beatrice is an inveterate recycler and proud of it. “My friends call me the Great Recycler,” she says. Anyone who receives a letter from her will find it inside an envelope saved from other correspondence, cleverly turned inside out to be used anew. Often, her letters are written on the backs of requests for donations or subscription renewals. When others complain about junk mail, she delights in the opportunity it presents. She uses the insides of billing envelopes to make origami birds; the pages of old magazines become small boxes, a skill she learned in kin-