From Nutrition to Ice Crystals

The whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. Beatrice Trum Hunter may not have coined that phrase, but she'd certainly agree with it. Long before Diet For a Small Planetand the Moosewood cookbooks, she was writing about food safety and nutrition. Her first book, The Natural Foods Cookbook, was published in 1961 and she's published over 20 since. Beatrice promotes natural, unprocessed foods above all else- think butter, not margarine, and stay away from the white flour and sugar.

She was also an early activist against pesticides and helped Rachel Carson with research for Silent Spring.

Beatrice was also the daughter-in-law of the famous photographer, Lotte Jacobi. She met Lotte's son, John Hunter, in New York City during World War Two. All three of them moved to a parcel of countryside in Deering NH in 1955 and she's lived there ever since. These days she's still writing, helping organize the Jacobi archives at UNH, and she's taken up photography. Her pictures of ice crystals have been shown at many of the state's leading galleries.

This interview originally aired last spring.