How the Northwest is Celebrating Eat Local Month

Eat Local Month is returning next month for a fourth year, putting a spotlight on the Washington farms, fishers, and producers that put the food on our plates every day.

All September long, farms and restaurants statewide are participating in Eat Local Month’s Get a Taste of Washington State campaign, where special menu items celebrate the farms that provide those goods, and those farms, in turn, invite the public to visit and get an up-close-and-personal look at how food systems operate.

The campaign’s founding group, Eat Local First also developed the WA Food & Farm Finder, an interactive digital map that allows users to easily connect with farms, ranches, and fisheries throughout the state. The comprehensive digital tool recently won the Best Digital Innovation award at the World Agritourism Awards at a global conference in Scotland. As the public’s need for transparency in food sourcing rises to new levels, it’s a welcome resource to have a thorough way to easily map locally sourced restaurants and shop directly with farmers.

Eat Local First’s website has a regularly updated event calendar, which lists farmers markets and special events, too. The site features listings for farm stands, u-pick farms, direct-to-consumer seafood marketplaces, and vacation spots that offer farm stays across the state. Its Food & Farm Finder map additionally lists businesses of all kinds — restaurants, bakeries, cafés — and what they source from local farms, as well as the outreach in which they participate with food banks and other resource organizations.