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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.

While many of us are familiar with the Dirty Dozen, the toxic fruits and vegetables to avoid as compiled by the Environmental Working Group, there is a lot of uncertainty and confusion as to what fish are healthy to eat.

One of my favorite non-profits, Food & Water Watch, has addressed this problem and come out with their own Dirty Dozen but for fish. These are the 12fish that they give a big thumbs down to.

Ever since I started eating organic food in 2001, people have asked me – why do you eat organic?

The most common answer that I give is that I don’t want to consume toxic pesticides or GMOs. That seems to resonate with people and they can easily understand it.

Over the last few years, however, my answer has evolved.

Of course, I mention the pesticides, but I also talk about how the chemicals used in conventional agriculture ruin our water supply (94% of our water now contains Atrazine) and sicken farm workers (residents in the farming community of Central Valley, CA are forced to drink bottled water because the tap water has become so contaminated from pesticides).

As a result of living in NYC but having grown up in Boston, I am quite aware of the difference between the two cities, in terms of the organic food and pressed juice offerings.

NYC has a ton and Boston has very little.

But with the recent opening of Cocobeet, ironically located between a Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts, it is an understatement to say that Bostonians are thrilled to have them there.

“On our second day of business, we sold 270 bottles of juice and had to close our doors because there was nothing left to sell,” Co-Founder Onur Ozkoc told me.

Now that many of my friends have young children, one thing that I hear from all of them is that “My kids won’t eat any green vegetables.”

This doesn’t surprise me in the least because (a) most kids would rather have french fries than spinach or broccoli; and (b) they have to be taught to like greens at a very, very early age. The good news is that there is an easy solution.

Juicing.

Whether you’re new to organic or have been eating it for decades, here is a very likely scenario when you go to buy eggs.

You stand in the refrigerated section of the market, look at all of options, check out the prices and make a decision largely based on the packaging of each brand.

Some have attractive pictures of rolling farmland, others show actual farmers, some have photos of the animals. Most certainly, the brands are using buzz words such as “cage-free”, “sunlit porches”, “omega 3-s” or “heritage breed”.

Are these brands being falsely deceptive?

In the latest President’s Cancer Panel report, it was found that 41% of Americans are going to get cancer and 21% of Americans are going to die from cancer.

What makes these numbers even more sobering is that this data was from a decade ago, and I have heard doctors say that they now believe a minimum of 50% of the population will get cancer at some point in their lives.

Given how deeply cancer has permeated our society, it would seem to make sense that people should be doing whatever they can to avoid contracting this deadly disease.

And according to a recent study out of France, as reported in JAMA Internal Medicine, eating as much organic food as possible is an important strategy to accomplish this.

Based on what we have seen from the current administration’s USDA — the scrapping of the organic animal welfare rules, allowing hydroponics in organic even though it is a complete violation of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, and turning a blind eye to ‘organic factory farms’ – should anyone be the least bit surprised that the recently released GMO-labeling rules completely fail the American consumer?