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Meitus: Tapping her organic roots

Published March 21, 2007 at midnight

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Myra Goodman is a small dynamo of energy - or she's a tiny bit jacked up on coffee - when we meet at Starbucks for her umpteenth cup of the morning. She's excited to talk about her cookbook Food to Live By, and how she went from big-city girl to small-town farmer, the words almost tumbling over each other.

"The first two recipes that I made up were gingersnaps and maple almond granola . . . I'm not a chef. I'm a home cook. I realized I knew more than I thought I did as I did the cookbook."

Goodman started Earthbound Farms with her husband, Drew, taking a small farm in 1984 and turning it into a multimillion-dollar organic force with its packaged salads. Her book, subtitled The Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook (Workman Publishing, $21.95), is full of attractive photos and recipes - and her story.

Goodman, a New Yorker, always "longed for green spaces. My mother was raised in Hungary and she had a craving to go back to that rural life. She told me to marry a farmer."

Instead she married another New Yorker, a former neighbor whom she re-met in college. On a lark between college and grad school, they took a yearlong stint working on a California farm. Organics was a little-known field back then but the Goodmans did their homework.

"We were doing baby lettuce and we'd cut and wash the whole leaves just at the tips and they'd stay fresh in plastic bags." The washed, bagged lettuce proved a hit with local chefs and other outlets. "In the beginning - this was 1986 - organic wasn't why people were buying it." (The technology to package salad in a bag nationwide was developed by another company later.)

When Costco bought their product in 1993, production soared. They joined with Mission Ranches in 1995 and with Tanimura & Antle in 1999 to continue growing.

Last September, the salad industry took a hit when an E. coli scare forced bagged spinach off the grocery shelves. The problem was traced to a processing plant that included their company's products. It was horrible, says Goodman. With stringent safety standards, such as triple-washed spinach, the company was careful about its product. Now there are even stricter measures on all parts of the process. But Goodman is a seasoned pro, who believes in her cause.

"I think you kind of make your luck when you have the belief in your heart that something is right and good," she says. "I think we really are driven to bring organics to as many people as possible."