On June 7, 1971, Jerome Irving Rodale appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show.” The elder statesman of a growing organic food trend, he gushed about the health benefits of his diet, boasting that he “never felt better” and that he “decided to live to a hundred.” But after a commercial break, as Cavett interviewed his second guest, what sounded like a loud snore rose from Rodale’s end of the couch. The audience twittered, thinking that he was pulling a prank. But Cavett knew. When he looked over at Rodale’s bloodless pallor and gaping mouth his suspicion was confirmed—America’s most famous natural-health figure was dead of a heart attack at 72.

It was almost as if, having sought fame for decades, finally achieving it was too much for Rodale’s heart to bear. A first-generation American and son of a Lower East Side Jewish grocer, Rodale had always dreamed of making it big as an entertainer. In the 1930s, he self-published entertainment guidebooks—The Clown and The American Humorist—but they flopped. In the early 1960s, he authored or produced 30 health-themed plays, many of which were performed in his off-Broadway vanity project, the Rodale Theater. These, too, bombed commercially and critically, and Rodale angrily rebutted his critics in page-long ads he took out in the New York Times. To reviews of his play “Toinette,” Rodale bristled:

The critics had not reviewed “Toinette.” They had reviewed J.I. Rodale, editor of Prevention, the largest circulating popular health magazine in the world, a magazine that because it is telling the truth, it’s a menace to certain powerful medical and industrial interests. These people are building me up as a menace, a quack, a food faddist.

For over two decades, Rodale also dispensed nutritional and lifestyle advice in his monthly magazines, Organic Farming and Gardening (est. 1945) and Prevention (est. 1950). In their pages, Rodale summarily rejected postwar medical advances. “Isn’t there a better way of conquering polio than jabbing all the children in the country with a needle?” he wondered in a September 1955 Prevention article. And he made wacky, unfounded claims about what causes and cures various diseases. “Rimless glasses” and saltwater cause cancer, Rodale contended, whereas the earth’s “electricity … aids the body to combat cancer.” Foreshadowing the counterculture’s pastoral idealism, he wrote in an October 1955 Prevention editorial, “We must go back to nature, if we wish to live long. … We do not have to stop the advances of technology [but] we must not industrialize and technologize our own bodies.”

The August 1971 cover of “Organic Gardening and Farming.” Rodale

In his autobiography, Rodale boasted, “Twenty years before [Rachel Carson] and her Silent Spring appeared, I began lashing out continuously against the dangers to plants, animals, and people of these poisonous insecticides.” Even then, in 1965—three years after Carson’s book came out—Rodale’s audience was limited but devoted. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that American culture (or, more accurately, counterculture) caught up with his ideas and his magazines stopped running at a deficit. By 1971, Rodale’s circulation had skyrocketed, with slightly renamed Organic Gardening and Farming selling 720,000 copies and Prevention 1,000,000 in one year. The New York Times Magazine took notice, featuring Rodale in a June 6, 1971, cover story anointing him “The Guru of the Organic Food Cult”—and landing him, exactly one day later, on Dick Cavett’s couch.

By the time of his death, J.I. Rodale had become the organics authority in America. His significance to today’s food revolution cannot be underestimated—and not simply because Rodale Inc. is still churning out the above titles, plus Men’s Health, Runner’s World, and others. He was at the forefront of a critique of industrial agriculture that contained a wariness (if not downright paranoia) about government, science, and business’s role in food production. Had Rodale had his way, his alternative proposals would have earned him a place of influence and respect in mainstream American society. But since the USDA and others roundly rejected Rodale’s organic designs, he cast them and the modern foods system as villains in a Manichean morality play, with self-serving bureaucrats and businessmen plotting against earnest organic advocates. That narrative lives on today. When celebrities like Jenny McCarthy spread misinformation about the dangers of vaccines, or locavores like Michael Pollan preach relentlessly about the evils of large-scale food production, they’re following in Rodale’s reactionary footsteps.