New & Noteworthy in Organic is a regular column where I share new and interesting organic products, drinks, restaurants, juice bars, books, events, and special promotions.

If you have any organic-related product or event that people should know about, please feel free to email me.

Solti, a fantastic pressed organic juice company in San Diego, has introduced several things that I have never seen before.

Not only is it selling pressed organic juice in glass bottles using UV light filtration – something completely novel and totally awesome – but it has opened a tasting room at its manufacturing plant. Read more »

With celebrities rushing to invest in organic food companies these days, Sarah Michelle Gellar truly stands alone.

This long-time Hollywood actress isn’t writing a check, fading into the background and hoping for a payout several years down the line. She is doing the exact opposite.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is helping to run and is playing an active role in building one of the hottest organic food brands in the industry. Along with her two other co-founders, CEO Galit Laibow and COO Greg Fleishman, Foodstirs is redefining the healthy baking category by using the best organic and Biodynamic ingredients available.

In addition to her acting career and responsibilities at Foodstirs, this Emmy Award-winning actress and mother of two recently released Stirring up Fun with Food: Over 115 Simple, Delicious Ways to be Creative in the Kitchen, her #1 best-selling book. Organized by the month, Stirring up Fun with Food succeeds because of its approach — providing engaging “food-crafting” ideas that help kids develop self-confidence, creative thinking, and even math skills in the kitchen. Read more »

(See the bottom for a special 10% discount for Living Maxwell readers.)

For those of us who truly care about health, we eat organic food, we drink ultra-purified water, we exercise, we meditate, we do yoga, we have a positive attitude, we use clean personal care products and the list goes on and on and on.

But arguably the most important aspect of staying healthy is something that nearly all people ignore – breathing clean air.

Here are the startling facts:

– We spend approximately 90% of our lives indoors.

– According to the EPA, the air quality indoors is 2-5 times worse than it is outside.

And if you have children with allergies or asthma, clean air inside become even more critical.

– The World Health Organization said that air pollution is more harmful than passive smoking!

– Microparticles, which HEPA machines cannot filter out, are linked to cancer, heart disease and strokes.

– Indoor air contains many chemicals, gases, synthetics and pollutants that did not exist 10 to 15 years ago.

The truth is that if you are not taking action to breathe clean air, a very important aspect of your health is being ignored. Read more »

In what is just more confirmation that the world is moving towards organic food, Papa John’s, the third-largest pizza delivery company, announced that it has launched an organic pilot program in its locations in Lexington, Kentucky.

Customers in this market are now able to order pizzas that feature four freshly-sliced, organic toppings: Roma tomatoes, green peppers, yellow onions, and mushrooms.

While major restaurant chains, including Papa John’s have made serious efforts to clean up their menu by removing artificial colors and flavors, the decision to offer organic ingredients has not been widely embraced just yet.

That is why this announcement by Papa John’s is so significant. Read more »

(Photo courtesy of Stonyfield)

As part of Danone’s acquisition of WhiteWave, it must sell the world’s largest organic yogurt brand.

A major piece of news broke this past week when French-based Danone announced that it had reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that it would sell its entire stake in Stonyfield in order to get approval for its $12.5 billion acquisition of WhiteWave Foods.

The DOJ said that “Without the divestiture, the proposed acquisition likely would reduce competition between the two leading participants and top brands in the markets for raw and fluid organic milk, potentially harming dairy farmers in the Northeast and U.S. consumers of fluid organic milk.” Read more »

If you are a frequent or new reader of my blog, I ask you to please do two things:

1) Watch the video above about Ron Finley, the ‘gangsta gardener’ in South Central LA.

2) Read the below and help save his operation in Los Angeles. He is under a very serious threat of eviction, and we must do whatever we can to help save him. Ron is one of our own, and it is imperative that he continue with his very important work.

—

Over the past week or so, there have been emails circulating throughout the organic industry from John Foraker, President of Annie’s, about Ron Finley. Read more »

Here is the cold, hard truth: our government is not protecting us from the toxic chemicals being sprayed on our nation’s food supply.

And some of these dangerous poisons are even making their way into organic food.

What You Need to Know:

* Glyphosate is the world’s most popular chemical, with approximately 250 million pounds used each year in the U.S. and 1.65 billion pounds used globally.

* The World Health Organization said that glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp, is a “probable human carcinogen”, which means that it probably causes cancer to humans.

The State of California has said that glyphosate causes cancer and is now requiring Monsanto to put a cancer warning label on its RoundUp products. Read more »