Living Maxwell
Company Stories
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.
Living Maxwell
Company Stories
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.
Living Maxwell
Company Stories
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.
Living Maxwell
Better Choices
Whether it is with a salad or any other dish that I am making at home, organic fermented foods – usually sauerkraut (above) or kimchee – can almost always be found on my plate. Why is this?
I have come to understand that if we want to have a strong immune system, we must take care of our gut and provide it with beneficial bacteria.
And that is exactly what fermented foods give us – beneficial bacteria.
Dr. Natascha Campbell-McBride, a Russian neurologist and founder of the GAPS Diet, says that:
“about 85% of our immune system is located in the gut wall. This fact has been established by basic physiology research in the 1930s and the 1940s. Your gut, your digestive wall, is the biggest and the most important immune organ in your body. There is a very tight conversation and a relationship going on between the gut flora that lives inside your digestive system and your immune system.
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Living Maxwell
Company Stories
At the recent 2011 Expo West trade show, I got a chance to speak with Minh Tsai, the founder of Hodo Soy Beanery. Hodo Soy Beanery is based in Oakland, CA and makes artisinal organic tofu.
Organic Insider
Must-Read
This post originally appeared in Organic Insider. If you would like to receive Organic Insider every other Wednesday, you can sign up for it HERE.
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If consumers are seeking fair and balanced information about GMOs, they certainly will not find it on the new FDA/USDA/EPA website called Feed Your Mind.
This site is part of the Agricultural Biotechnology Education and Outreach Initiative, which was funded by Congress, and is intended “to share science-based information that educates, informs and broadens understanding about agricultural biotechnology for consumers.”
Not surprisingly, it presents a very one-sided view of GMOs.
Living Maxwell
Better Choices
For several years, the local food movement has been gaining some serious momentum. Supermarkets are pushing locally-grown food and restaurants insert “local” into their menus as often as possible.
I have a good friend of mine who proudly and constantly tells me that he is eating local food all of the time. When I hear this, I just kind of shake my head. Why do I have this reaction?
While this issue is very complicated and the circumstances of every single piece food is vastly different, there is a lot more to this than many people realize and “local” isn’t necessarily better.
Yes, local food means that it has traveled a lot less (within 150 miles seems to be the accepted range) than something that has been shipped across the country.
Living Maxwell
Better Choices
A while ago I did a story on gold nugget mandarins and when I saw this unknown fruit above, I couldn’t help but think of them because of the similarity of the rind.
And just as I had never seen gold nugget mandarins before, the same was true with these organic kaffir limes.
When I started asking the woman at my local organic market about kaffir limes, she quickly asked “Do you want to try one?”
With a bit of reluctance, I said “Ok, I guess.” After all, eating limes isn’t something that I normally do.
Living Maxwell
Company Stories
In what is sure to send shockwaves throughout the entire industry, A-list celebrity Jennifer Garner and John Foraker, former President of Annie’s, have signed on to become co-founders of organic baby food company Once Upon a Farm, alongside current co-founders Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz.
Having recently stepped down as the head of Annie’s, where he led the company for 18 years and negotiated its sale to General Mills for $820 million, John Foraker is one of the most accomplished and respected executives the organic industry has ever seen. And if you combine that with Jennifer Garner’s star power, branding acumen and dedication to both healthy food and helping children, Once Upon a Farm will be a very, very serious force in the fast-growing organic baby food segment.
Organic Insider
Must-Read
If you haven’t noticed by now, organic is under constant attack in the media for one simple reason — healthy, organic food has become a serious threat to the business model of Big Ag and their chemical-laden GMOs.
That is why you will see pieces such as the recent Wall Street Journal op-ed The Organic Industry is Lying to You and The Boston Globe’s article on agriculture which tells you to “learn to love” GMOs.
While critics will often say that organic is a waste of money and that the nutritional differences between organic and conventional are negligible, here are three reasons why you should completely dismiss their words — glyphosate, atrazine and chlorpyrifos.
