New Year update

Now that the New Year is underway, and we’ve just about finished our annual planning, I thought I’d spend a minute or two and let you know what’s in store from Sustainable Table this year.

First, we must give a big thank you to all of you. We had over a million (yes, over 1,000,000!) visitors on our site this year – far beyond what we expected, and all of you are making a difference. Farmers markets continue to increase, CSA programs are springing up everywhere, and everyone seems to be going ‘green’. Even Oprah just did a whole show on being green. (She happened to be joined by Simran Sethi, who joined us for a few days while we were on the Eat Well Tour across the country.)

And all this is happening because you’re out there asking the right questions, buying local sustainable food, and taking an interest in everything from your health to saving small family farms.

So over the next year, we’ll be focusing on updating our information and adding more material (like the effect of agriculture on climate change). We’re in the process of developing Educational Kits, so you can learn more yourself or you can use the information to help educate the people around you. We’ll let you know as we launch parts of the kit.

We’re also working on a film from our cross country tour this past August. It’s not scheduled to be finished until 2009, but we’re hoping to have clips and small bits of it ready throughout the year to share with you.

We’re also going to be focusing more on the blog, so you can keep up to date with the news and information in the sustainable food world. One of our new features will be “Platter Chatter”, where we’ll speak with consumers, advocates, chefs, and others in the sustainable food world to hear what they think and about what they are doing. We’ll be launching this on Monday with our first series, “What is Sustainable?” We’re asking the same questions to people all over, so we can all see the similarities and differences around the various parts of the country.

We’ll also be posting a survey soon, to get feedback on what you might want to see more (or less!) of. If you don’t want to wait for the survey, please feel free to email us anytime and let us know what you think about our site, blog and program.

This is a very exciting time for all of us – local sustainable food has never been more popular, and we all are making such a huge difference in the marketplace. Let’s keep it up! And may you all have a delicious New Year!