On April 24, two friends set out on bicycles from Hardwick, Vermont, to explore the local food movement. As they approach their final destination—Portland, Oregon—my post on the USA Character Approved Blog shares some of what they found.

To our grandparents and great-grandparents, local food was just food, something grown by them, their neighbors or maybe a farmer a few miles away. Anything that had to be shipped from someplace more distant—an orange, for instance—was deemed exotic, something to be reserved for a holiday gift.

Fast forward to today, though, and local is the new exotic. Increasingly, “locally sourced” is the new mantra for restaurant chefs, home cooks, community activists, environmentalists… But what does local food really mean, to those who produce it and those who consume it? Friends Aaron Zueck and Robert DuBois decided the best way to study local was to go national, biking across America, hosting potluck dinners along the way and talking to people about food, over food. They named their epic project Bikeloc. Continue reading “Biking across America in search of local food” →