The Weekly Pick — NRDC: Eat Local

What a find! I was looking to update the seasonal section on the Sustainable Table website today when I stumbled across- JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR! How often does that happen? By accident? Exactly what I needed.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, who happen to be headquartered just across town, have a wonderful Eat Local tool in the “Health” section of their website. It is titled, “Eat Local, does your food travel more than you do?” and they give you a tool to make sure that it doesn’t.

The Eat Local tool allows you to choose a state and the season (broken down into 2 sections per month!) and then takes you to a page with bushels of seasonal information. When I type in “New York, late January” I am directed to a page with a list of the few things that are in season right now- apples, cabbage, carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips- and they also list surrounding states, just in case they have something better there. And in the case of NYC, some other states are awfully close by. If I’d prefer to tempt myself and look ahead, I can click to see the whole NY state year in one place. They even link to the websites where they got their information so that you can check out more local info.

I hope that everyone is as excited about this as I am. While it seems that NRDC is focusing on food miles and maybe the health of the planet, this all extends to our personal health too… isn’t that the best.