Will You Buy Oprah's Organic Produce?
by Cristina Goyanes for SHAPE.com
Superstar media-mogul Oprah Winfrey may be dipping her hand, particularly her green thumb, in another completely unrelated business: agriculture. The 59-year-old recently revealed that she has plans to turn some 16 acres on her 1,000-acre property on Maui into farmland. The idea, which came from her friend and health expert Bob Greene, was to grow crops on an island that imports roughly 90 percent of its food.
"We realized if we could grow delicious food ourselves, we could share it," Winfrey wrote in the May issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. She hired the natural resource management group Bio-Logical Capital to help oversee the harvest, which includes more than 100 species of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. They're planting the, er, seeds of change on one side of the dormant volcano called Haleakala at some 4,000 feet above sea level.
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Right now she's giving away the crops-about 145 pounds per week from just one acre-for free to restaurants and charitable efforts, but Greene expressed in a recent video posted on People.com that they plan to start selling the produce under a yet-to-be-determined brand name, such as "Oprah's Organics" and "Oprah's Harvest." We'll likely not see her use "Oprah's OWN," which is the name of her TV network, because it would be too close to another celebrity's famous organic food line, actor Paul Newman's Newman's Own.
"I grew up with a grandmother who was always growing things-everything that we ate came from our own little one acre, and to be able to have a full circle moment like this, not in Mississippi but in Maui, is fantastic," Winfrey said in the People.com video.
Would you buy Oprah's organic produce? Tell us in the comments below or tweet us @Shape_Magazine.
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