Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Living Locally: A Resource Guide

If you were inspired by the November 12 service on supporting local businesses and eating locally-grown foods, here are some resources to help you:

Area farmers’ markets include Palo Alto on Saturday mornings, Mountain View and Menlo Park on Sunday mornings (plenty of time to go before or after church!), and Los Altos on Thursday afternoons

Sustainable Connections:  http://www.sconnect.org/.  For ideas on how to create a similar network in the Bay Area, see http://www.sconnect.org/thinklocal/workshops.

http://www.acterra.org/index.html Action for a Sustainable Earth

In Context, a magazine focused on how to create humane, sustainable culture, http://www.context.org/

The American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), http://www.amiba.net/

Locavores (http://locavores.com/) and , focused on eating foods grown and harvested in our area.  Other local-food resources are at http://www.100milediet.org/, http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/, and Local Harvest, which helps connect buyers to locally-produced agricultural products:  http://www.localharvest.org/

The Sierra Club has lots of information on why eating local is such a great thing to do for the environment:  http://www.truecostoffood.org/

And for a great day out, pick your own lunch or dinner! A guide to pick-your-own farms is at http://www.pickyourown.org/. This is a great activity with kids, not only because it teaches them that food doesn’t grow on supermarket shelves, but because it’s so much fun!

Chocolate lovers, Guittard Chocolate is produced right in our neighborhood (Burlingame) and is listed on http://www.transfair.org/ as a fair trade company, to boot.

Thanks to Jennifer Rancourt for contributing many items to this list. --Rev. Amy