“We may be going back to the land, but lots of us are bringing our smart phones and laptops along,” comments Destin Joy Layne, director of the Eat Well Guide, a free online directory of fresh, locally grown and sustainably produced food in the United States and Canada.

Eat Well’s thousands of listings include family farms, restaurants, farmers’ markets, grocery stores, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, U-pick orchards and more. Users can search by location, keyword, category or product to find good food, download customized guides, or plan a trip with the innovative mapping tool, Eat Well Everywhere.

Searching is easy: find farms, markets, and restaurants by keyword, zip code, city/state, or by “Plan a Trip”–the mapping tool allowing you to input your staring and destination points to find local, sustainable, and organic foods along your trip route.

Together with the enterprising spirits of independent farmers, locally owned businesses and partner organizations, the Eat Well Guide’s collaborative technology harnesses the power of the web to effect social, environmental and economic change, and maps the route to a more sustainable food system.

Image by Jason Houston Photography

The Eat Well Guide was initially created by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) as a directory of sustainably produced animal products.  The Guide in its current form includes all types of food products.

The Eat Well team believes that “ecologically sound, community-based food choices are essential to solving environmental degradation, climate instability, economic inequality and the myriad adverse health effects of industrialized food production. By creating local connections among consumers and producers of fresh, sustainable food, we seek to increase access to healthy food, expose unjust and unsustainable food production practices and expand markets for small-scale farmers and other socially responsible food producers.”