Check it out: local food in Austin

Sign for the Austin Farmers' Market

Hands-Free Cooking has been quiet over the past week, but my life has not!  I’ve been off at South by Southwest (SXSW), hanging out with some very cool geeks and spending so much time talking and thinking about blogging (along with the rest of that social media stuff) that I haven’t had any time to blog!  But, as I was surprised to discover, there are tons of sustainable foodies at SXSW and in Austin, and I got to meet a lot of them.

Austin seems to have a strong and growing local food contingent.  I met someone from the recently formed Resolution Gardens, a local Austin organization which previously planted vegetable gardens in unused space in local families’ yards, and has since expanded into offering gardening classes and helping home gardeners sell their produce to local supermarkets.  This is a great system – it helps families get more delicious, healthy food, makes productive use of land that would otherwise just grow grass, and supports the local food economy.  They have plans to grow and become a really serious resource for home gardeners in Austin.  I wish we had something like them in the DC area.

There’s also a lot of local food pride.  I was out for a walk and accidentally discovered where a farmer’s market is held (though I wasn’t there at the right day or time – and I don’t even know what seasons it runs).  I liked this sign: “just-picked Texas goodness.”  It makes sense: local food should be a matter of local pride, and I don’t know any place with more local pride than Texas.  Maybe that’s a message we should be using more, with a little friendly competition.  If someone claimed that a tomato that travelled a thousand miles from California was better than a tomato grown in your home state, would you be inspired to prove them wrong?

It wasn’t all local to Austin, either.  There are a lot of groups out there using technology to support the sustainable food movement.  One of my favorite examples was Farms Reach, a beta site that’s connecting chefs with local farmers to order and pick up produce online, thus mitigating one of the big challenges of navigating the local food scene if you’re preparing food on a large scale.  Serving local food in restaurants is becoming very “cool”, at least in my area, but the restaurants that do it tend to be high-end and pricey.  Maybe a service like Farms Reach will bridge the gap and make it possible for more restaurants to feature local produce.  They’re just working in California now, but planning to spread to other areas soon.

One challenge I heard discussed was the problem of compiling a full, public list of farmers’ markets and other local food resources.  There are some pretty decent ones, but none are complete or make the data available to coders.  It’s tricky: there are thousands of small farmers’ markets around the country, and they’re constantly changing.  Still, it would be very cool if we could pull this data together and make it open for use on the web.

I also spent a lot of time learning and thinking about blogging – in general, as well as specific to this blog.  I’ve got a lot more thinking to do, and I won’t write here about the technical things that I learned, but you’ll probably see some changes here over the next few weeks.