People – Places – Products (Fresh Cooking)

Eat Well Guide

The Eat Well Guide® is a free online directory for anyone in search of fresh, locally grown and sustainably produced food in the United States and Canada.

Eat Well’s thousands of listings include family farms, restaurants, farmers’ markets, grocery stores, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, U-pick orchards and more.  Users can search by location, keyword, category or product to find good food, download customized guides, or plan a trip with the innovative mapping tool, Eat Well Everywhere. Eat Well is also home to The Green Fork blog and the free educational booklet Cultivating the Web: High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement.

The Eat Well Guide was initially created by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) as a directory of sustainably produced animal products.  IATP later joined forces with Sustainable Table on the project. The Eat Well Guide in its current form, which includes all types of food products, launched in 2003, along with The Meatrix, a critically acclaimed Flash animation series about the dangers of factory farming. Eat Well emerged as an independent program in 2007.

Eat Well and its sister programs, Sustainable Table, The Meatrix, Healthy Monday, H20 Conserve, and Network for New Energy Choices (NNEC) promote community-based sustainable practices for the production and consumption of food, water and energy. Working with research, policy, consumer and grassroots communities, the programs raise public awareness and advance policies that support an economically and environmentally viable future.

We especially like their Seasonal Food Guides and the great recipes from The Sustainable Table. Buon Appetito! And let us know what you’ve found that’s particularly useful.

An Eater’s Manifesto

Michael Pollan is arguably the most informative food writer writing today. In Defense of Food reminds us that the time-honored credo–Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.–is really the simplest approach to a healthier life. This book will inspire you to reconsider your eating habits and help you to live a more sustainable, local life. Also available on CD.

GreenYankee also found this very useful (partial) list of Pollan’s sustainable eating resources.

BOOKS

• This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, by Joan Dye Gussow
• Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, by Marion Nestle
• Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm-Fresh Food, by Joel Salatin

ONLINE

•    Center for Informed Food Choices (www.informedeating.org) advocates for a diet based on whole, unprocessed, local, organically grown plant foods; their website contains a useful FAQ page about food politics and eating well, as well as an archive of relevant articles.
•    Eat Well (www.eatwellguide.com) is an online directory of sustainably-raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs. Enter your zip code to find healthful, humane, and eco-friendly products from farms, stores, and restaurants in your area.
•    Eat Wild (www.eatwild.com) lists local suppliers for grass-fed meat and dairy products.
•    Food Routes (www.foodroutes.org) is a national nonprofit dedicated to “reintroducing Americans to their food—the seeds it grows from, the farmers who produce it, and the routes that carry it from the fields to our tables.”Heritage Foods USA (www.heritagefoodsusa.com) sells mail-order ‘traceable’ products from small farms—maple syrup, pole caught tuna, grassfed kobe beef—whose labels provide every detail about their production and processing.
•    Local Harvest (www.localharvest.com) offers a definitive and reliable nationwide directory of CSAs, farmers markets, family farms, and other local food sources.
•    Locavores (www.locavores.com), based in San Francisco, encourages people to eat only foods produced within a 100-mile radius of home. Their Food Web page offers a plethora of additional resources, including books, articles, and websites.
•    Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture (www.stonebarnscenter.org) is a hands- on educational center and restaurant that aims to demonstrate, teach and promote sustainable, community-based food production on a real working farm 30 miles from Manhattan.
•    Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org) offers an introduction to the sustainable food movement and the issues surrounding it, plus resources for further investigation (the links for ‘Introduction to Sustainability’ and ‘The Issues’ are good places to start).