Livingmaxwell Homepage

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.

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.

Recently, I stopped by the offices of Sakara Life, the fantastic organic meal delivery service based here in NYC.

Even though I have known co-founders Danielle DuBoise and Whitney Tingle for a few years, I hadn’t fully researched their company until now. And what a huge mistake that was because it is an incredibly impressive operation with delicious food.

Currently, Sakara Life is delivering fully-prepared, 100% organic, gluten-free, plant-based meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) to customers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The service will eventually be expanded to other parts of the country, with California on the company’s near-term radar screen.

Here were a few things that I tasted.

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?

One question that I get a lot is “How should a person get started with organic food?” One complaint I hear a lot is that organic food costs too much.

Let me both answer this question and address this complaint with a story.

Last week, Brian, a new friend of mine, came to me for some food-related advice. He wanted to know what he could be doing to eat healthier, as he was “crashing” in the middle of the afternoon. Brian was very concerned that his eating habits were negatively impacting his ability to perform at work, which would impact his ability to make money.

He did not know much about organic and was very concerned about the price. When I started talking about organic food, the first words out of his mouth were “Hey, I don’t make $20,000 per month.”

Brian went on to tell me about the fast-food breakfasts that he had been eating and he didn’t think it was the cause of his problem.

What GMO apologists will constantly tell you is that genetically-modified food is essential to feed the world.

They’ve spent so much money on lobbying and influencing politicians – $572 million from 1999 to 2010 – that a majority of people in Washington D.C. have actually come to believe this nonsense. (University of Michigan’s Catherine Badgley explains here why organic can feed the world.)

But GMOs, we are told, won’t just feed the world. They’ll supposedly nourish it as well.

One prime example of this is GMO ‘Golden Rice’, which was touted as a way to help solve a major global health problem by providing kids adequate amounts of Vitamin A. 

All we hear from the chemical industry is that synthetic pesticides are safe to consume, and they will go to any length to make sure that Americans are exposed to as many chemicals as possible.

Here are a few examples.

* A pro-chemical group called The Alliance for Food and Farming attacked the Environmental Working Group‘s Dirty Dozen list, the list of the most pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables, and demanded that the EWG stop publishing it.

For many of us who understand the importance of organic, we eat and buy organic food without thinking about it.

We know that we don’t want to consume food that contains artificial growth hormones, synthetic pesticides or genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).

We know that it is essential for us to purchase the highest quality food possible.

We know that food is medicine.

Yet, there are too many people out there who are just not that concerned about the food that goes into their bodies. They largely assume that since our government allows it on the shelf, it is safe.