All is fair & organic

The eighth edition of The Redwood Foundation’s Organic Fair is a step towards making healthy and cleanliving a lifestyle choice
All is fair & organic

CHENNAI: From natural vegan ice-creams and artisanal cheese to natural chemicalfree cosmetics and healthy chaats, jams and pickles, the eighth edition of the popular Redwood Foundation Organic Fair promises to convert your kitchen and home into a discerning space of mindful eating and clean living. While the city vendors have only recently been grappling with the plastic-free decree, Madhura Visweswaran tells us how at Redwood they went plastic-free, five years ago. The Redwood Montessori was founded by Madhura and Shankari Kamakshi Subbiah in 2011 with 11 kids.

From the start, being conscious of their environment was part of life for them, with their kitchen providing only organic meals and snacks for the kids. “When we started Redwood, we believed that your mood, your learning and your emotions are also influenced by what you eat. So the idea was to not just provide a healthy learning environment by making positive choices in terms of education and activities, but to also offer the children only healthy choices in food,” says Madhura. They also provide a ‘rainbow-coloured’ menu that supports local sources and focuses on seasonal, indigenous and organic produce. In a bid to support the organic movement, the Organic Fair was put together to promote the cause as a lifestyle choice.

The duo started with about 12 stalls nearly a decade back and this year they are setting up nearly 45 from across the country. As the goodwill ambassador for The World Wildlife Fund in Tamil Nadu, Madhura tells us to also expect books and printed material on wildlife that teach children the importance of protecting the environment and guide them to launch an energy conservation initiative. They have also included a pet adoption drive this year. A strong advocate for natural and organic products, Madhura and Shankari support minimally processed, preservative-free and naturally occurring nutrients and ‘the vision of the fair is an extension of the school’s ideology’. Their mantra is simple — if you can’t pronounce an ingredient on the label, you probably shouldn’t eat that food! Instead of components that sound like things from lab experiments, opt for foods with ingredients you find in home kitchens, they insist. “This is what the Redwood kitchen has achieved.

We would like the community to have access to all these vendors who are producing chemical-free soaps, detergents and food free of preservatives,” says Madhura. The Organic Fair, she says, is not a profit-driven concept for Redwood, instead, it is an attempt to grow the organic movement — ‘if more people will buy organic, then more will sell’.

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