Eat Locally While Traveling

By guest blogger Kathy Chavez

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Eating locally can be a challenge when at home, while eating locally on vacation may seem impossible.   But it's worth the effort. Whether deciding to splurge on a nice meal out on vacation or at  home, keeping it local feeds both the economy and your body well.

Local dining is eating at an establishment that is owned and run by someone that lives in the community, and preferably the food served comes from local growers and ranchers too.  Regional is usually defined as farmers and ranchers within one hundred miles of the establishment.

The benefits of eating locally are numerous, both environmentally and health-wise.  The most important reason for me is taste, as very few things beat the flavor of fresh picked food.  Produce consumed within hours of ripening tastes best and provides better nutrition than food that matures in the truck.

While traveling the same methods of finding local restaurants can be used as when you’re at home.  They include word of mouth, the internet, and local magazines.  If time and season allow attend a growers market.  Local markets frequently serve prepared food and they will also know the best places that serve their produce.  Just ask them where they eat.

The online search for local dining can be time consuming, overwhelming and frustrating. After doing several online searches for Albuquerque, Chicago, Santa Fe, and San Francisco the most helpful for me were Yelp, Dinegreen, and Citysearch. Yelp and Citysearch are good for reading personal reviews and tips about restaurant atmosphere and what to order.  Dinegreen is through the Green Restaurant Association, a national non-profit working towards a more sustainable restaurant industry. For the consumer, dine green.com shows restaurants' scores according to seven categories including water efficiency, energy, waste reduction, and sustainable building materials. It's an important effort, considering "the restaurant industry consumes a third of all U.S. energy used by the retail sector and the average food service faculty uses 300,000 gallons of water per year." 

So, whether you're eating here in New Mexico or out of state this holiday season, don't forget to celebrate local.

Edited by Jasmine McBeath