End of the Year - Tour Wrap Up by Diane

December 12, 2007
The Eat Well Guided Tour of America
End of the Road…

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First, thank you so much for your help, hard work, and support when the Eat Well Guided Tour of America came to your area. The tour couldn’t have happened without you, and we’re deeply grateful for everything you did to help make our trip the overwhelming success that it was, whether you hosted a pie-related event, joined us for a meal at a restaurant, or toured us around your farm or store.

In our opinion, the tour was most successful because of all the amazing people like you that we met all across the country. Even though you might not know each other, you’re all speaking in the same voice and all working toward the same sustainable end. In addition to everyone we met, we received a lot of media attention for the tour, from outlets like the New York Times, Newsday, Chicago Sun-Times, and NPR to local press in every area we visited.

We started going through our tour book to give you highlights from our favorite stops, but we realized we were writing about every single place we visited! If you’re interested in knowing about our stops and our experiences, please read our road trip blog at www.sustainabletable.org/roadtrip. One thing we can say, though, is that we certainly ate well everywhere we went! We sampled well over 200 pies - from walnut, blueberry, apple, peach and every type of berry pie to savory pies like oyster mushroom, goat cheese and tomato, green tomato, and various types of pizza.

And what can one say after an experience like this? From harvesting the wheat and berries and making our own pies in Northern California and dining on a golden mountain top in Washington, to meeting cowboys in Wyoming, picnicking on farms in places like Iowa, Indiana and New York, to hosting pie competitions in farmers markets - and meeting happy cows, pigs, chickens and goats all across the country – how could we ever wrap this up in a couple pages?

Our overall impression from the tour is that sustainable food is here to stay. It’s not a trend, fad or even movement anymore – there are so many of you out there, people who are dedicating their lives to producing or promoting local sustainable food – that it’s time has come. We were so moved by the amount of people, from all walks of life, from coast to coast, who pulled us aside to thank us for making this trip. They said we needed to let others around the country know what’s being done with local sustainable food – we just wish you knew how many of you there are!

The tour also reaffirmed our hope for the future. Yes, there are problems, and we spoke with people who told us about difficulties with land access, lack of farmers, sprawl, water issues, processing problems, how farmers can’t continue at farmers markets indefinitely because it’s so time consuming, etc. But through all the challenges and all the difficulties, we met person after person, group after group, who are doing it, who are farming sustainably or promoting sustainable agriculture, supporting their local economy, and who are making a living at it.

And a lot of you - farmers, chefs, and food advocates - are what we’re calling “The New Face of Food” – you’re young, passionate, and you’re doing it for more than yourself. You have a shared vision of a better world, where we all have access to healthy, great tasting food, and you’re dedicating your life to producing or promoting it. We filmed our whole trip and are currently working on a twenty minute documentary about a couple of these new faces that we met. We’re hoping this might help show the rest of the country what’s happening in the food world. In the future, we’re also hoping to highlight a lot of you on our website.

We also weren’t aware of how important food access is in the sustainable food world, and were thrilled to see how many groups around the country work with low income residents, immigrant families, and people in need. Sustainable food is not elitist, and everyone we met seemed to be looking at ways everyone can have access to the food, whether it be working with food banks, offering CSA scholarships or work programs, or hosting farming programs where plots of land are offered to the less fortunate for little to no money. Some groups work directly with residents, helping them to grow their own vegetables in their back garden or even in pots on a balcony or front porch.

The local, sustainable food ethic is about looking beyond ourselves to everyone around us – and that’s what we saw all across the country. We saw that local, great tasting, healthy food brought people together and created a community that looked out for, and after, each other. Supporting local food is crucial to protecting and saving small sustainable family farms, the environment, animals, etc – but it’s also about bringing people together, back around a table, to enjoy great food and each other.

Again, we can’t thank you enough for your hospitality and help as we came through town. We must give a huge thank you to the Slow Food and Buy Fresh Buy Local chapters around the country – so many members came out to events and helped us that we’re forever indebted to you – we hope we can work together again with all of you in the near future.

We’ll be sending you an email in the next couple months (assuming we have an email address for you). Sustainable Table is a very small program – there are four of us right now – and it pains us because we can’t stay in touch like we want to, but we want to try! We have a newsletter called The Pasture Post that comes out every month or two – we’d like to send you a copy so you can stay in touch with what we’re doing. We would also love to hear any personal stories you might have about the tour or what you do to highlight on our website. We think it’s so important to continue the momentum this tour has started and to continue to educate consumers around the country about everything that’s out there. And if you have any suggestions on how we might be able to stay in touch and network groups together, please let us know!

We’d also like to add all the local groups we met into a searchable database that will be hosted on our site and will also be accessed through the Eat Well Guide. Visitors to the site will enter their zip code to find local sustainable groups, so, hopefully, we’ll be able to match you up with interested people in your area.

Once again, we’re deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and spend some time with you. Thank you – and Happy Holidays!

Now let’s go change the world – one bite at a time!

All the best in the New Year,



Diane (on behalf of the Sustainable Table and Food & Water Watch team)

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