Nell Newman: Defining Natural and Organic

In 1982, the actor co-founded Newman’s Own, a line of foods that he him­self loved and helped to cre­ate. Thinking that the com­pany would prob­a­bly post losses or at best break even, Newman was pleas­antly sur­prised when peo­ple around the world took to Newman’s Own prod­ucts in droves. Since its found­ing, the com­pany has donated 100 per­cent of its prof­its to charity—and as of August 2009, that fig­ure had topped $280 million.

In 1993, Paul’s daugh­ter Nell decided to step up to the plate her­self and estab­lished a purely organic divi­sion of the com­pany, Newman’s Own Organics.

A Natural Introduction

From child­hood, Nell had been exposed to nat­ural foods. At their rural Connecticut home, the Newmans had a gar­den and raised chick­ens. Nell Newman was taught to cook by her mother and spent many hours fish­ing with her father. While in col­lege she con­tin­ued to exper­i­ment in the kitchen, and she is still the des­ig­nated chef when home for fam­ily hol­i­day dinners.

Nell attended the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, grad­u­at­ing with a bachelor’s degree in human ecol­ogy. She worked briefly at the Environmental Defense Fund in New York but, pre­fer­ring a more rural envi­ron­ment, soon moved to north­ern California. It was there she redis­cov­ered fresh, locally grown food.

“When I was in col­lege, there was not a lot of organic,” Nell told Organic Connections. “It was mostly nasty lit­tle wrin­kled apples. Eden Foods had some stuff, but there sim­ply wasn’t a lot of fresh organic pro­duce. It was just things being grown in people’s back­yards or what­ever was wild.

“So I was amazed that, when I moved out here in 1988, there was a Wednesday farm­ers’ mar­ket that had already been there for a cou­ple of years, and as far as I know, it was largely organic. I had never seen any­thing like it. Then I ate at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse restau­rant many times. I told my dad, ‘Pop, organic does not have to mean heavy whole wheat!’ I told him there was a world of organic out there that he wouldn’t believe. And then when I was fundrais­ing for a small non-profit, I kept look­ing at what Pop was doing and think­ing, That looks like an easy way to raise money for non-profits. Maybe I should start think­ing about doing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. So I came up with this hare­brained idea to do an organic divi­sion of Newman’s Own and see if we could make a go of that. And it’s done pretty well.”

Indeed it has. Beginning with a line of pret­zels, the company—with the motto “Great tast­ing food that hap­pens to be organic”—has expanded to include choco­late bars, Fig Newmans, Champion Chip Cookies, choco­late cups, Newman-O’s, Pop’s Corn, Alphabet Cookies, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar, dried fruit, Soy Crisps, Hermits, mints, cof­fee and Royal Tea. Of course, much more is planned.

The Importance of Defining “Natural”

Along the way, Nell made sure that the prod­ucts for Newman’s Own Organics were truly organic. More than 70 per­cent of all ingre­di­ents used in the for­mu­la­tion of Newman’s Own Organics foods are organic, and all prod­ucts are cer­ti­fied by Oregon Tilth, a lead­ing organic cer­ti­fier, fol­low­ing strict guide­lines laid down by the USDA on organic production.

Nell has recently dis­cov­ered just how impor­tant such stip­u­la­tions are—and how nec­es­sary it is for retail­ers to help edu­cate con­sumers to watch for them. As it turns out, it is equally impor­tant for prod­ucts labeled “all natural.”

“I saw an arti­cle the other day say­ing that Eden Foods had put out a call for hav­ing a stan­dard for ‘all nat­ural,’ which I thought was real inter­est­ing because there isn’t any,” Nell said. “I now know how impor­tant that is. I was home about a month ago, and my mom’s house­keeper had gone out to buy a brand of soy milk that my mother has been drink­ing for years. She thought she was buy­ing the right stuff, but when she brought it back I looked at the box and I thought that it looked like their organic prod­uct. But on closer inspec­tion, it wasn’t. It turns out they now have a line of organic and a line of con­ven­tional, but the orig­i­nal prod­uct has the same pack­ag­ing; so unless you look, you won’t know.

“Our house­keeper also bought for me what was labeled ‘16-grain bread,’ and I thought that was really impres­sive. But then I looked at the pack­ag­ing, and the ingre­di­ents listed were whole wheat, oats, corn syrup, bar­ley malt—basically it had 2 or 3 grains and a bunch of filler. At the very bot­tom the label stated that there was ‘no more than 2 per­cent of the fol­low­ing’ and it listed the other 13 grains. It was mind-boggling! Basically wheat and filler. The con­sumer knows what the con­sumer wants, but the con­sumer doesn’t always know what to look for. I think the retailer has a big respon­si­bil­ity to not just sell prod­ucts but to sell good prod­ucts. It’s frus­trat­ing when you real­ize that you’ve bought the wrong thing because you weren’t pay­ing atten­tion, but it’s hard to tell sometimes.”

Genetic Modification

Like a num­ber of other top food activists today, Nell is also speak­ing out on a mat­ter many con­sider dan­ger­ous, and one which a lot of con­sumers are unaware of because the law doesn’t require label­ing: the genetic modi-fication of crops. Not long ago, she wrote an excel­lent fore­word to Andrew Kimbrell’s book Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food.

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

“It’s clear to me that a hand­ful of chem­i­cal cor­po­ra­tions have rushed gene-altered foods into our fields and super­mar­kets with­out con­duct­ing the sci­ence needed to demon­strate the safety of these foods for our chil­dren, the envi­ron­ment and us,” Nell observed. “In fact, inde­pen­dent stud­ies com­ing in from uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ment agen­cies, both here and abroad, demon­strate the haz­ards that these biotech foods can present to our health and to the nat­ural world.”

A major part of the prob­lem that genetic engi­neer­ing represents—especially to organic farmers—is cross-contamination. “Initially the party line from chem­i­cal com­pa­nies was ‘There will be no prob­lem. The pollen only blows three feet. There will be no genetic cross­ing.’ And of course they were wrong about that,” said Nell. “It does hap­pen and it’s some­thing that organic farm­ers have to deal with—hopefully not too often, but it is a prob­lem. And it is a prob­lem because organic farm­ers are out there work­ing as hard as they can to grow a crop that has not been con­t­a­m­i­nated, and proces­sors work as hard as they can to process that crop into an uncon­t­a­m­i­nated prod­uct, and they’re doing every­thing pos­si­ble. But the cross-contamination is some­times out of their hands. It becomes a very expen­sive propo­si­tion for the organic farmer to make sure that noth­ing is contaminated.”

In sup­port of her state­ments, Nell points to a law­suit recently won by the Center for Food Safety in which, for the first time in his­tory, a court ordered the halt­ing of plant­i­ngs of a new genet­i­cally engi­neered crop. In 2007, a US District Court in California ruled that the USDA ille­gally approved genet­i­cally mod­i­fied alfalfa with­out first prepar­ing a full Environmental Impact Statement tak­ing into account the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of con­ven­tional and organic alfalfa. Monsanto, the defen­dant in the case, appealed twice. CFS defended its vic­tory and in June 2009 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court deci­sion, deny­ing both of Monsanto’s appeals, thus uphold­ing a two-year-old nation­wide ban on the plant­ing of genet­i­cally engi­neered alfalfa.

As to why the gov­ern­ment allows genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crops to con­tinue with­out test­ing, Nell—like many of us—suspects some “insider” work with the gov­ern­ment. “I always won­dered why,” she said. “It seems to be such com­mon sense and yet noth­ing appears to be hap­pen­ing. Then about five or six years ago, I read an arti­cle in Mother Jones and real­ized exactly why it’s so hard to get some­thing done about it. In this arti­cle, they actu­ally fol­lowed the heads of all these big biotech com­pa­nies as they left their jobs and went to work for the gov­ern­ment and wrote pol­icy and then went back to their for­mer posi­tions. It’s a flow­chart; it was an amaz­ing arti­cle. For exam­ple, they worked for Monsanto and then they worked for the USDA and then they wrote food pol­icy for two years and then they went back to Monsanto. After that, I under­stood why it was so hard.”

Nell advises all of us who are in the know to keep our­selves informed and to keep oth­ers informed as well. “I think doing your home­work, edu­cat­ing your­self about organ­ics and the issues around them, is very impor­tant so that you can become an edu­cated con­sumer. You can also join a non-profit that you think is actu­ally doing a good job in terms of help­ing reg­u­late these issues. The Center for Food Safety is a great one, and there are oth­ers. You can also pres­sure your local con­gress­men to con­sider this a mat­ter of impor­tance. Without a doubt food safety is a big con­cern these days and you could cer­tainly con­sider this a food-safety issue.”

The Growing Market

“I believe, on a con­sumer level, inter­est in sus­tain­ably grown food is really increas­ing, which is indi­cated by the growth of farm­ers’ mar­kets. People are more inter­ested in where their food is com­ing from and are will­ing to go that lit­tle extra bit to find it. It is an oppor­tu­nity to get fresher pro­duce directly from the source. I also think that trend will help pro­mote growth by hav­ing the buyer’s dol­lar go directly to the farmer, and we’ll con­tinue to see an increase in farm­ers’ mar­kets and more abil­ity to buy on a local level.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Newman’s Own Organics, please visit www.newmansownorganics.com.

To learn more about the Center for Food Safety and their con­tin­u­ing work, visit www.truefoodnow.org.