On the Side: Reinventing Rodale

EMMAUS, Pa. - The rain had paused here sufficiently one day last week for Maria Rodale to sit on the stone wall where she'd played as a child; where the fountainhead farm of America's organic movement still brings forth a ration of breakfast eggs for her family, and the greenhouse yields spring sorrel, arugula, and early-ripening tomatoes called Fourth of Julys.

She was taking a break from a board meeting of the nearby Lehigh County Hospital, the pieties of patient-centered care the topic du jour.

But whether out of hair-down candor or weariness with sweating the small stuff, she found herself moved to impure thoughts. If the organic label is co-opted by profiteers, well, so be it, she said: "We have to accept that people are going to eat crap. Let 'em eat Twinkies. Let 'em eat chips. If Dunkin' Donuts wants to make organic doughnuts, I say that's brilliant!"

Just don't let 'em wreck the planet.

This is not what you'd call daintily put for the current - since 2007 - board chairman of Rodale Inc., "a global multi-platform media company," as it now bills itself. (Or for a mover and shaker named by Gov. Rendell this week as one of Pennsylvania's "Top 50 Women in Business.")

Nor is it necessarily on message, if you expect the newest generation of pruned-down, beefed-up Rodale brands - ab-centric Men's Health (circulation 1.8 million) leading the pack - to speak with one voice.

It doesn't quite jibe, either, with the thesis of the company's latest hope for blockbuster book sales - The End of Overeating, former U.S. Food and Drug commissioner David Kessler's j'accuse of chains that use addicting fat, salt, and sugar formulas as insidiously as Big Tobacco uses nicotine.

But at a Rodale that has reinvented itself, sometimes jarringly, axing fledgling magazine ventures (New Woman) and just days ago ousting a veteran editor (at Organic Gardening), Maria Rodale is blunt about adding a save-the-Earth chapter to the family legacy.

How that legacy began - with her grandfather J.I. Rodale, born in 1898 on Manhattan's teeming Lower East Side in an urban approximation of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl - is the stuff of a newly issued Rodale imprint, Our Roots Grow Deep.

How it progresses, though, is not entirely in Maria's hands. Since 2000, the company has had a CEO cut from a different legacy - Steven Murphy, "the cuff-linked New York [and Disney publishing] executive," as BusinessWeek called him, and the subject of endless speculation.

Did you hear that he mapped out a croquet court next to the show barn at his country home in Ottsville, Bucks County? Can you believe his genius in landing wunderkind David Zinczenko for Men's Health (and its sizzling spin-off book, Eat This, Not That)?

He is angular, urban, intense, given to shirts bearing the Polo logo of Ralph Lauren (on whose board he sits), the Jack Sprat to Maria's amiable, zaftig Earth Mother; she lives in a solar-equipped eco-house in Bethlehem.

"It is said," Murphy likes to repeat, "that we're a great blend of Type A and Zen."

If it's hard to detect the dual personality at the top - or in the cultures of Rodale's Manhattan and Emmaus offices - there's no missing it on the magazine covers: This month's Organic Gardening (circulation 284,000) offers "Get More Tomatoes from Your Garden"; Women's Health (circulation 1.1 million) teases, "Look Great Naked!"

At 67, family-owned Rodale Inc. is grafting its earnest, healthy-soil past to a hot, flat-belly future.

Gambling that it can have its cake - and eat it, too.

A mile from the Rodale family's original Organic Gardening Experimental Farm, the Rodale Inc. Cafe's First Annual All-You-Can-Eat Outdoor Grill was winding down under gray skies in the leggy grass behind the company cafeteria in the South Mountain Building.

About 500 workers occupy the building's muscular publishing arm (producer of the blockbuster The South Beach Diet) and magazine offices for Men's Health, Prevention, Runner's World, Bicycling, and the honored, if low-grossing, grandpa, Organic Gardening.

In step with the ethos of vertical integration here, the menu was from Rodale's own Peace, Love and Barbecue cookbook. And with the exception of the overcooked chicken, it was a picnic of good, virtuous (mostly), local (mostly), organic fare - moist, meaty ribs from Berks County's Country Time Farm, iceberg wedges with Roquefort dressing, Jean Tweedy's Hearty Broccoli, Rice and Cheese Casserole, and lime cupcakes with frosting from New Mexican prickly pears.

An attendee at one table couldn't be blamed if he wasn't feeling the love. He was Scott Meyer, deposed only hours before as editor of Organic Gardening.

A new editor - prolific gardening journalist Ethne Clark - was on the way, tasked with finding a broader audience, a more "inspiring" message.

When the White House is digging its own organic garden (and agronomists from the 300-acre Rodale Institute's demonstration farm near Kutztown are invited to help plan an even bigger one on the grounds of the U.S. Agriculture Department), it's time to catch the wave.

Even if you got it rolling in the first place.

Emmaus is named for the town where Jesus was said to have appeared after his Crucifixion and Resurrection.

It is five miles southwest of Allentown, and for its first century - until the 1830s - it was a closed community, the preserve of Moravians.

That had changed profoundly, of course, by 1942, when J.I. Rodale - having long before evaded his father's attempts to market him as a child-prodigy Yiddish singer (his birth name was Yakov Cohen), and having recently quit an Emmaus-based family business in electrical parts - fell under the thrall of British agriculturist Sir Albert Howard's thesis that artificial fertilizers were destroying the health of farm soils (and of those who partook of their harvest).

"One of these fine days," Rodale prophesied, "the public is going to wake up and will pay for eggs, meats, vegetables, etc., according to how they were produced."

When he bought the 63-acre farm on Minesite Road, it was a mess. There were dead chickens in the corncrib. A slaughtered steer hung in the stairway, ready to be cut up.

The soil was worn out, too. But even as Rodale improved it with composting, the local farm-ocracy, seeing quick yields from newfangled synthetic fertilizer, was unmoved.

That resistance, finally, led him to drop the words and Farming, from the title of his magazine: It would be Organic Gardening, period.

Robert Rodale, Maria's late father, was 11 when his father bought the depleted Reinhart Farm. He was put to work alongside a tenant farmer and local stonemason, fashioning the wall she was resting upon last week.

If her grandfather was about championing the soil and the fruits thereof, and if her father added fitness to the portfolio, she added the longer view - the health of the planet, in sync with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, the alarum about global climate change published, by the way, by Rodale.

She is convinced - and proffers evidence from test plots at the Rodale Institute farm - that organic soils not only suck more carbon out of the air, but do better at locking it in than regular farm soils.

But somewhere along the line, she said, the healthy-food movement and the environmental movement got out of alignment, got moralistic and dogmatic.

The chief worry is the ruination of the Earth, she said: "Puritanism is not sustainable."

From the stone wall, she could look out on the fresh-plowed fields on the other side of Minesite Road. They belong to the hospital on whose board she sits.

What is grown in them? She paused. Her grandfather's prediction had proven so true. Her company's crusade has been so unflagging.

She almost choked on the words; on the bitter irony.

"Chemical corn," she said.