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“There are almonds and cashews in bulk,” Mama said enthusiastically as they drove over to St. Johnsbury on a late fall day. “And coconut peanut butter, which is almost better than mixing tahini and honey. And an energy drink of tomato and lemon juice mixed with brewer’s yeast and liver powder. What a boost!”

“Hot damn,” Papa said.

Health food united Papa and Mama as much as, if not more than, their love of the outdoors. “How are the nuts and berries today?” more traditional friends liked to tease. Papa came to whole foods as an athlete needing to maximize his nutritional intake, but Mama’s interest in healthy eating started as a way to keep her weight down. An aunt had given her Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit when she was a pudgy teenager, and she adopted the whole and raw foods advocated in the book to find the slender figure she would keep for the rest of her life.

Mama and Papa shared a growing anger when shopping at supermarkets filled with rows upon rows of packaged and canned processed foods, or when seeking something other than fast food on a road trip. Why did it have to be so hard to find good, healthy foods that nourished the body rather than depleting it? Before the industrial revolution and the world wars whole and fresh vegetables, meats, and grains had been more commonplace, but the factories and economic growth of the 1940s and ’50s supported processed and canned food and the convenience of the supermarket. By the 1960s, bulk foods were all but outlawed in favor of prepared meals and mixes—“empty food,” some called it. As one of Papa’s favorite cartoons stated, in reference to the neutron bomb: “It’s called the junk food bomb. It destroys populations while leaving profits intact.”

Advertising had done its job—overworked women wanted to buy their food ready-made instead of slaving in the kitchen like their mothers. The problem was, no one yet knew the effects these “easy” foods would wreak on the health of the nation.

As Mama and Papa entered the white clapboard New England–style house at 8 Pine Street, a bell rang to alert the owners, who lived above the store. Hatch’s was founded by former missionaries to India who had become missionaries of health food. Mama and Papa were greeted by the scents of candle wax and sage, and by the Hatches’ son David, who wore a one-piece blue jumpsuit, his long hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail. His wife, Carol, was breast-feeding her baby in a chair by the cash register.

“Welcome, welcome,” David called, puttering nearby as they shopped.

There were bins of dried peas, kidney beans, lentils, brown rice, spices, and, of course, wheat groats to grind into flour and cultures to make yogurt. In the back of the store was also a lending library with books about natural living. Papa was drawn to one on healthy eating called Faith, Love and Seaweed by the father of Olympian swimmer Murray Rose about the diet and mind-set that won the gold in 1960, and the less useful Breatharianism, about living on air. A month later they were back, not for the liver drink, which Papa found unpalatable, but for the bulk food and books.

“You’ve got to check out this one,” David told them, pointing out Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, the 1954 edition, with a print on the cover of a green wheelbarrow behind a row of maple trees. The pages were well worn.

“This is right on,” Papa said, reading the book aloud to Mama back at the cabin they shared in Franconia. In Living the Good Life, the Nearings told the story of leaving New York City in 1932 to become homesteaders in Vermont—turning an old farm into their primary livelihood, building a stone house, maintaining an organic garden, and living off the sale of syrup from the maple grove on their property.

“We left the city with three objectives in mind,” the Nearings wrote in their conversational but self-serious tone. The first was to live independent of the economy; the second,