Organic NZ – September 2019

Promote • Educate
14 September/October 2019

Feature

---We are the Name behind Names.

The Soap Factory is a Biogro and GMP certified bar soap contract

manufacturer base in Auckland. Bar soap is popular because of its

natural plant base formula and ECO friendly packaging unlike liquid

wash using plastic bottles, we have access to add NZ native organic

ingredients to make your unique soap product.

CONTACT US

The Soap Factory Ltd.

2 2 Ben Lomond Crescent, Pakuranga, Auckland 2010

Tel + 6 4 9 576 9046

E-mail: [email protected]

Web: http://www.soapfactory.co.nz 5789

The unhealthy truth

Everything changed one morning, however, when the youngest of

her four children had a life-threatening allergic reaction to eggs at

breakfast. 

Robyn then dove into a year of research on what  is really in

common foods. “It was this awful rabbit hole of realising what had

been done to our food system, what hadn’t been shared with the

public, what hadn’t been labelled... It just punched me in the gut

to realise that we held ourselves up as this incredibly developed

country, with this lesser food system.”

In 2009, she published the best-selling book The Unhealthy Truth,

a damning look at the US food system. She became a sought-after

public speaker and media personality, and a food industry advisor.

Robyn also has ties to Aotearoa. Although she was born in the

US, her mother is a Kiwi, and Robyn is named after a New Zealand

farmer. She returned to these islands in June, at the invitation of

Organic Winegrowers New Zealand, to speak at the Organic and

Biodynamic Winegrowing Conference in Blenheim. The biennial

conference has become one of the country’s largest organic events,

drawing 350 people this year.

Aotearoa’s organic opportunity

Hard-hitting statistics about the food system roll off Robyn’s

tongue. In the US, food allergies have become an epidemic. One

in three American children now have one of the ‘four A’s’: allergies,

asthma, ADHD or autism. Sharing these numbers in her talk in

Blenheim, Robyn posed one of her trademark questions: “Are we

allergic to food, or what’s been done to it?”

However, when we sat down to discuss the future of organics

in the US, Robyn was more optimistic. “It’s growing like crazy,” she

says. Her trip to a Countdown supermarket in Blenheim surprised

her, as the store’s organic content seemed to be many years behind

the US; the organic section was just a tiny separate area. 

“That’s where we were probably eight years ago,” she says. “Now

you walk into a conventional grocery store [in the US] and mixed

through every aisle, in every single category, is organic. It’s too

big to have it be just one little section of the grocery store; it’s now

literally woven through the entire store.”

“And we don’t produce enough for that,” Robyn says. About 5.

percent of food sold in the US is organic, but less than one percent

of US farmland is certified organic. A vast amount of organic food

is imported, particularly fresh produce. 

from sipping soda to

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organic food

champion

Above: Robyn O’Brien has been called ‘the Erin Brockovich of food’.

Photo: Robyn O’Brien