Victoria Everman

Eating dinner is no longer as simple as going to the local grocery store. Our food consciousness has changed drastically in just one generation, and I for one say it is about damn time we wake up and smell the chemicals! While industrial food is still a major mainstay in the average American home, local, organic, whole foods are getting a foothold.

How do you navigate the world of farmer’s markets, food blogs and charitable organizations? Save a copy of Eat Well Guide’s new Cultivating the Web e-book and you’ll be all set! Featuring intelligent essays by noted moved and shakers in the sustainable food movement, Cultivating the Web includes lists of eco-food focused blogs, networks websites, consumers resources and more.

Not only meant as a resource, Cultivating the Web is also meant as an inspiration on how and where to get your own voice out about sustainable food. I recently chatted with Cultivating the Web’s editor and project manager, Leslie Hatfield about this one-of-a-kind guide. A freelancer hired to edit Eat Well Guide’s Green Fork blog, Leslie took on the Cultivating the Web project over the summer and was able to complete the entire guide in time for the groundbreaking Slow Food Nation event - oh, and did I mention the guide is FREE!?

Read on for my interview with Leslie, which includes insights on the value of Cultivating the Web, the significance of the Slow Food Nation event, how sustainable food concerns fit in with the overall eco-movement and more!

Victoria Everman: How did the idea for this project begin?

Leslie Hatfield: I guess it just sprang up organically — because Eat Well is a web-based program, we wanted to present what we know best — promoting good food through new media.  After that, the ideas for what to include kept coming and it pretty quickly became a question of what all we could fit in.

What is your goal for the Cultivating the Web book?

Our primary goal is to help farmers and others who produce good food to self-market and thrive.  Likewise for sustainable food advocates, and on the other side, to make it as easy as possible for people to find those producers and advocates.  We basically wanted to build and maintain a living resource that is helpful for people all along the spectrum of food production.

This is kind of what the Eat Well Guide is all about — helping people to find good food and leveling the playing field between Big Food and small producers.  Farmers and local restaurateurs can’t compete with agribusiness in terms of traditional advertising, and that’s what makes the internet such a great medium for consumers to get informed about food choices, and for local businesses to gain visibility.  But the internet is also vast and kind of confusing, so it helps to have a compilation of some of the best stuff out there.  That said, we surely missed some things, and that’s where keeping it online comes in — we can update it as we learn more, and keep sharing the information.  We hope that a lot of people will send us links to add, so that we can keep it as comprehensive as possible.

Did the project start out with the goal of being a free document, or did that come later?

Eat Well is a nonprofit program, so it never really crossed our mind to charge money for it.  If somebody felt moved to pay for it, we’d encourage them to donate to any of the food organizations listed in our book, or to their local food bank.

What useful resources can average consumers find in the book?

The resource section is something we’re particularly proud of, and we intend to keep adding to it in the digital version.  We list some amazing sites, like Seafood Watch, which tells you which seafood are healthful as well as sustainable.  People who want to learn more about food issues will also find a ton of great resources, like Food & Water Watch and Sustainable Table and the Organic Consumers Association.

They’ll also find information on our new mapping feature, Eat Well Everywhere, the beta version of which just went live last week, which enables users to map their way to good food, anywhere in North America.

Was the release of the book intentionally close to the Slow Food Nation event?

Yes.  We were definitely inspired by Slow Food Nation — it’s the first event of its kind in the US, and we’re thrilled to see so many people come together not only to celebrate good food, but to talk about how to fix our broken food system and better support small-scale food production.  So we wanted to debut the print copies there, but also to create something that would live on long after the event was over.

Do you feel that the Cultivating the Web book fills a gaping void?

I do think that new media is changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up even if you work in it.  Likewise, we are learning more all the time about the ecological impact of our food choices, and sustainable alternatives to so-called “conventional” agricultural methods, so our book is helpful in that it gives people one tool to navigate those landscapes.

And I think Cultivating the Web is one of the first documents of its kind — I’ve never seen anything quite like it — both in terms of putting all those resources and case studies out there for everyone, and also in keeping it alive on the site.

What do you see as the most important factor in the sustainable food movement right now?

While we’ve seen a lot of movement in both new and traditional media (there seems to be a good-food story in the NY Times every day, which I like to think means we are winning), the most important factor in the movement will always be the food and the people who produce it.  Without the local food producers who’ve managed to stay in business (or been brave enough to start up), we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  Of course they need people to feed, too, so the consumers and the media and the advocates and scholars all play important roles too, but again, without the food and farmers, we’d be nowhere, not just as a movement, but as a species.

And the food — once you’ve had really wonderful food (and I don’t necessarily mean fancy food — most of my favorites are really simple, like kale braised with garlic and a little vinegar) eating sustainably seems more like a blessing than a sacrifice.

That said, the vast number of sustainable food advocates, from the activists to the bloggers to the organic farmers, and their voices, whether in person or on the web, are doing amazing work, and they are able to do so in part because the internet is still our most democratic medium.  So we owe a bit to the internet, and need to keep our eyes on net neutrality.

How do you see today’s food concerns as part of the expanding realm of environmental consciousness? (Small part, big part … etc.)

It’s huge. You can’t have a very comprehensive conversation about ecology without touching on food.  Industrial agriculture is harmful at every stage of production, from the application of petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer to the packaging and distribution.  And everyone eats, so unlike some other, more expendable industries, food’s not going anywhere.  It’s been heartening to see so many environmentalists take on food issues over the last few years.  There is still a lot of work to be done, but the important thing to remember is that we’re all in this together.

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