The Green Fork is the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. Click here to Find Good Food.

Welcome to the Green Fork, the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. My name is Leslie and I’ll be your host. Today, and hopefully, for many days to come, we’ll be serving up an assortment of all things green and edible.

Who are we? Collectively, we are friends of the Eat Well Guide, a nonprofit consumer education program and keeper of one of the most comprehensive green-food directories in the world. Eat Well is a program of GRACE, a New York-based foundation that promotes innovative solutions to create an economically and environmentally viable future.

This blog is more of a potluck than a hosted dinner party–I’m proud to serve as editor, but you’ll also be hearing from Erin McCarthy, who’ll pop in a few times a week to dish the food news, and Chelsea Dewitt, who’ll be chiming in with timely information on seasonal foods, and of course, Destin Joy Layne, the fearless leader of Eat Well, whose passionate and expansive vision has vastly increased the Guide’s listings and who heads a team that is currently developing some of the most cutting edge applications in Web technology–tools that will be available this summer to help you and your families, and your neighbor’s families to find good food. More on that later.

You’ll likely also be hearing from some of our hardworking and brilliant interns and externs, college students who are taking part in the Greener Future Program and helping us review new listings, research food issues and promote businesses that sell locally-grown, sustainably-produced food.

And hopefully, you’ll hear from more folks: we hope that as we grow, friends of ours will use the Guide and share their stories with us, and we want to connect hungry readers to local purveyors of good food, so we invite farmers, farm, market and co-op workers, restaurateurs and others to share their stories, too.

As for me, I am a writer by trade, a picky eater by nature, and a food activist by twist of fate. An on-again, off-again vegetarian for years, I now consider myself an ethicurean, to borrow from the noteworthy blog, a person who is concerned with the impact of my diet on the health of my fellow travelers and the planet, the welfare of animals, and the viability of local economies. I was happy to become involved with the Eat Well Guide in 2006, when I took a job with Sustainable Table (the group that produced the Guide, with IATP, back in 2003) in New York City. I used to blog for ST (also a program of GRACE) at their blog, the Daily Table. Since then, I’ve left New York and resettled in Baltimore, Maryland and started consulting and am happy to count Eat Well among my clients. I’ve almost always worked with food–I waited tables, tended bar, and occasionally, cooked for many years before I finished college, and prior to my work at GRACE, provided research for a report on digital marketing of junk food to children and teens. The daughter of one of the thousands of Vietnam veterans who’ve developed prostate cancer, I have a strong aversion to unnecessary chemical applications to the natural environment. I also have a background in communication and media, so you’ll likely catch me promoting green ideas in food and dissecting the messaging of Big Food, especially as it is directed toward children.

What’s on the menu? We believe that people are waking up around the world and starting to ask vital questions about the food they eat: whether it’s genetically modified, or laden with pesticides, antibiotics, or artificial hormones, whether its production involved grotesque treatment of animals or gross abuse of the environment, whether industrially-produced food is better than un-certified local food, whether laborers are being paid and treated fairly, and much more. We want to help people find answers and alternatives to a food system that leaves us unsafe, unhealthy and unwilling contributors to the pollution and degradation of our land, water and air. We know that there still exist farmers who are stewards of the land, savers of heirloom seeds and keepers of healthy, well-treated animals–these people and their forward-thinking enterprises are not always easy to find–they don’t usually sell out of strip malls or advertise on television, so you have to find them and support them, lest they fall prey to a system that subsidizes unhealthy, un-natural food and like 330 other farmers, every year in the US alone, are forced to shut down operations.

We want people also to know who runs the big factory farms, who makes the legislation, and who’s working to make positive changes in the food industry. Our status as a 501c3 keeps us from endorsing specific legislation, but we will point you toward organizations who can tell you more about how to get involved. For our part, we offer you the tools to help you vote with your appetite and your dollars. In the end, we believe that while the problems that surround our food are many and complex, the answer is simple: to find small-scale growers/sellers who are doing the best they can to raise food naturally and ethically.

Most of all we want to share everything that we, collectively know about food and what we continue to learn. We hope you’ll grab a fork and dig in with us