Biography
Rodale was born in New York City on August 16, 1898, the son of a grocer. He grew up on the Lower East Side. His birth name was Cohen but, thinking it would be a handicap in business, he changed it to a non-Jewish one. He married Anna Andrews in 1927 and had three children: Robert Rodale (1930–1990), Nina Rodale (who married Robert Hale Horstman and then married Arthur Houghton), and Ruth Rodale.
Inspired by his encounter with the ideas of Albert Howard, Rodale had an interest in promoting a healthy and active lifestyle that emphasized organically grown foods. He founded Rodale, Inc. in 1930 in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and established the Rodale Organic Gardening Experimental Farm in 1940. He was the founder of Rodale Press and publisher of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine starting in 1942. Organic Farming and Gardening promoted organic horticulture; later retitled Organic Gardening, it is the most-read gardening periodical worldwide. To Rodale, agriculture and health were inseparable. Healthy soil required compost and eschewing poisonous pesticides and artificial fertilizers. Eating plants grown in such soil would then help humans stay healthier, he expounded.
One of Rodale's most successful projects was Prevention Magazine, founded in 1950, which promotes preventing disease rather than trying to cure it later. For decades it has been a leading source of information for those in North America interested in alternative health, including before the natural foods movement became popular in the late 1960s. It pioneered the return to whole grains, unrefined sweets, using little fat in food preparation, seldom eating animal products, folk cures, herbal medicines, and breastfeeding. It also promoted consuming more than typical amounts of nutritional supplements and forgoing nicotine and caffeine.
Read more about this topic: J. I. Rodale
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
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