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Last week, I was in New York City to attend two fantastic trade shows — 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show and Good Food Mercantile.

Whenever I go to these shows, I always come across some outstanding organic products, and this year was no exception.

Here are my Top 10 Organic Products of the 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show and Good Food Mercantile.

For those of us who are fans of Dr. Bronner’s, the company’s products have a constant presence in our households, and we use them to clean our bodies and physical surroundings on a daily basis.

While this is unquestionably a critical component of our lives and imperative to maintain good health, cleaning transcends removing whatever is on our skin, on our clothes or on our kitchen countertops. It also affects our emotional well-being and directly impacts how we show up in the world.

And this is precisely why Lisa Bronner’s Soap & Soul: A Practical Guide to Minding Your Home, Your Body and Your Spirit with Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps spoke to me so much, as it squarely touches on the importance of cleaning both the tangible and intangible — an essential formula for a meaningful life.

For as long as I have been covering the organic food industry, I have attended Natural Products Expo East, with my first show in Boston in 2009.

So, it is very bittersweet to report that after last week’s show in Philadelphia, there will be no more Expo East moving forward. New Hope, the organizer of the event, has decided to launch something new in 2024 called Newtopia Now.

Having recently returned from Natural Products Expo West, a very intense and long five days visiting hundreds of trade show booths and meeting with dozens and dozens of people, one thing is very clear — I felt incredibly fortunate to have stayed in a Pure Room.

Launched by a company called Pure Wellness, a Pure Room is an extremely unique hotel offering that is addressing the needs of wellness-minded travelers in a way that I have never seen before. For people who place a serious priority on health, such as myself and many Living Maxwell readers, it is reassuring to know that this lifestyle can be maintained when on the road.

And now that I have stayed in a Pure Room on three separate occasions — most recently at two different hotels in the Los Angeles area for Natural Products Expo West — these hotel rooms have completely changed the way that I think about travel and how I book my accommodations.

Ok. Let’s be very, very honest here.

How many times have you been at the market, looked at a piece of organic produce, seen numerous imperfections, and then searched for something that looked a little bit more aesthetically pleasing?

I’m certainly guilty of doing that.

But the question is: Why do we do this?

When I review organic food products, I do my best to make sure that they are available either online or at retail locations throughout much of the country, so readers can go buy them.

Sometimes, however, my excitement about a product is so strong that I have to make an exception.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, not only was I fortunate to have eaten at Dr. Andrew Weil’s restaurant True Food Kitchen for the very first time, but I was also lucky enough to have discovered Ozuké kimchi by the Esoteric Food Company.

For the most part, sauerkraut, kimchi and other fermented foods is a very regional business.

So, wherever you go in the U.S., there tends to be a different local producer of these foods.

Stories about the toxicity of our food supply just keep rolling in.

As I wrote about recently, numerous samples of conventional apple juice were found to have unsafe and illegal levels of arsenic. And now orange juice is having its own set of problems.

Coca-Cola, which makes Minute Maid and Simply Orange, reported to the FDA on December 28th that some Brazilian growers of oranges that are used in the company’s juices and those of its competitors had sprayed their trees with carbendazim, a toxic fungicide.

As a result, the FDA temporarily halted all shipments of imported orange juice while it conducts field tests. Products already on supermarket shelves that have “low levels” of carbendazim (80 parts per billion) may still be sold.

I get asked all of the time by people “how do I know that the food that I am eating is organic?”

Well, when we buy food in the supermarket, there is an organic certification process managed by the USDA. Those organic food products have the organic seal.

Yet, what do we do when we go to restaurants?

While there are very few restaurants that have actually been certified organic (there used to be one in NYC called Gustorganics), most of them are not.

In this video, I share with you the one question that I always ask when I go to a new organic restaurant. The answer gives me a good idea about how serious they are about organic.

The more time that you spend in the organic industry, the more you learn about what is truly going on and what you find is pretty scary.

While I try to remain as optimistic as possible, the reality is that the organic industry is under a constant existential threat from genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).

Even though organic food has never been more popular, nearly 80% of the food on supermarket shelves contains GMOs and organic remains less than 1% of all farmland acreage in the U.S. While 64 nations around the world require GMOs to be labeled, the U.S. does not. Why?

Because the ag-biotech industry has “purchased” agricultural policy in our country, by spending $572 million on campaign contributions and lobbying from 1999-2010.

If you read in the media or someone tries to convince you that organic doesn’t matter, do not believe them.

It does.

And it could potentially save your life.

In a just-released, peer-reviewed study, four families across the country were fed both an organic and non-organic diet, and the ones who ate all organic saw their pesticide load drop by as much as 95%!