Straight from the Source Edibles

In the ongoing battle between good and bad food choices, the most powerful weapon we have in our arsenal is knowledge. And, whether or not you've seen Food, Inc., it's pretty clear that the sources of our "American diet" are a controversial topic. From the backyard gardener to the urban Whole Foods enthusiast to the Midwesterner reliant on the closest Walmart Supercenter, consumers are demanding details about the sources of their food purchases. Thankfully, we're beginning to see more tools designed to give us that information, hence allowing more consumers to make informed choices, even if it's just about a bag of lettuce.

Your Salad Story: "Location, location, location." The real estate mantra is just as applicable to the food you eat as it is to your home. Fresh Express, the packaged salad brand, created this micro-site to provide über-comprehensive information about the source of your bagged greens, including everything from Growing Regions (a list of eight regions with details on climate, growing season, agricultural history and a map) to Salad Experts (details from experts on every step of the production chain, from the seed, to the harvest, storage, packaging, quality control and store delivery). It also offers a Freshness Promise (in-depth information on the Fresh Express method of providing the freshest product) and a Leaf Locator (a tracking function which allows you to enter a code on your bag of Fresh Express to uncover the location in which your greens were grown). Chatting up the stall attendant at your farmer's market sounds way easier to us, but if that's not an option for you, this seems like a suitable alternative.

Where Is My Milk From?: A variety of dairy products, from cow's milk and goat's milk to cottage cheese, yogurt and sour cream, can be sourced at this site with the click of a mouse. As it turns out, those mysterious numbers you typically see printed on the package of your dairy foods next to the expiration date actually refer to a specific state and production plant. Once entered into the site, you can identify where the product was born. While this information is good to know, we'd love to see a Fresh Express-inspired take on it, with more particulars on the production processes and, of course, the animals from whence all this creamy goodness emanates.

Seafood Watch's Sustainable Seafood Guide: The Monterey Bay Aquarium has been providing exceptionally valuable information on sustainable seafood and ocean awareness for a decade via its Seafood Watch program. For those with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, this same content is now available on the fly (and updated in real time to reflect current changes). Recently named the Best Smart Phone App by online eco-tome Treehugger, the Sustainable Seafood Guides for seafood and sushi covers five U.S. regions - using the phone's GPS, the user's current region will download automatically - and highlights the "best choices", "good alternatives", and those you should "avoid" based on things like contaminants, overfishing and farming. If the power of information can influence Target to ban farmed salmon and Trader Joe's to begin implementing sustainable seafood policies, then maybe there is hope for change after all.