Easier every day to eat local

This is so cool.

Four geography students at the UW-Madison have created an interactive map of local food sources (within 100 miles of Madison), including farms, co-ops and markets. It's still in beta mode, which means it's not quite done, but what they've got so far is quite impressive and pretty slick.

Check out the "100 Mile Diet Map" here.

I love stuff like this. Easy to use and pretty thorough, it makes the task of getting more of what you eat from local sources so much simpler. And frankly, if we hope to get more people on board with the local food movement, the easier it's made the better.

A few other local food resources:

• Wisconsin Local Food
  
• Slow Food Wisconsin
• Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge
• Eat Wild (national resource with many WI farms)
• Wisconsin's Farm Fresh Atlas
• Home Grown Wisconsin (sustainable growers serving restaurants)
• Savor Wisconsin

It is possible to get most of your food from more local producers, and with world food prices being what they are, we should be doing our best to encourage people and governments to get more of their food from nearby sources. It cuts the cost of transporting it, helps support local economies, lowers the demand for fuel, and helps with sustainability issues. Will it fix everything overnight? Probably not, but all signs point to it being the healthier, longer-term solution.