Eating locally sourced foods is a high priority for many athletes and coaches. One of the most common excuses for not eating locally is not having a source nearby for local food, as convenience is often king. I found Locavore in the search for a resource to quickly find farms, CSAs, and stores local to my clients where they can get grass-fed meats, seasonal vegetables, and other staples.
Locavore is not a new app – in fact, the last update was in March 2012 – but it works well for me, and provides a great service to my clients as well. There are a few other apps out there that have tried to provide this service, but I’ve found their data over a larger geographic area to be lacking.
Here are some of things I love about this app:
Location-Specific
Locavore allows you to look for vendors, in-season fruits and vegetables, and other app users of the application in your geographic area. If you are looking for information for a client who is not geographically near you, you can use the menu to select a different location, as shown at the right.
Seller Categories
Within the Local Sellers category, you can choose to display local farms, farmers markets, and CSAs by clicking the menu at the bottom.
Being Social
Locavore allows you to be social by posting information about what you’ve found in your area for other Locavore users, and even invites you to post a picture of your local food find. I haven’t used this feature a great deal, but it does allow you to tag a local seller and that food item in your post so that people can find out not only what is in season, but also what items a vendor might have at this time.
I have two minor complaints about this app. The first is that I need to create yet another login for it. I’m hoping they introduce Facebook login integration in the next version. The second complaint is that there hasn’t been an update since last March, and a long-awaited recipe section still is not active. I’d love to see that go live!
While this app has been around for a while, I’ve had a lot of success using it to find resources for my clients for locally grown food. Sometimes additional information needs to be found on the schedule and season of farmers markets and local farms, but often knowing they are there is half the battle.
If you have a favorite app or website for finding local and sustainably farmed foods, please post it in the comments!
