Eatin' green

Yo green eaters,
So as I was blowing up the google search engine this afternoon I decided to do a little searching to see how easy it is to find sustainable or "eco-friendly" restaurants. Surprisingly there are a couple of really cool search engines that will help you out. The first I stumbled upon was The Green Restaurant Association's website. They are a non-profit organization that certifies restaurants as "green" based on a point system. The restaurants have to earn a certain number of points to get a two, three, or four star rating. The more sustainable the restaurant is, the higher it's rating. Seeing as the website had a search engine I looked at how many sustainable restaurants Tennessee has. Ready? Two. Yeah, thats right - two restaurants that are green certified. Now I know this website is probably not all encompassing - it is only showing the restaurants which have applied to the green restaurant certification process and been approved. I'm sure there are many other restaurants out there which don't even know of this association or don't want to bother with certification. (Btw, both of the restaurants were in Nashville - they look pretty delicious, called Tayst and The Mad Platter). But when searching just the New York Metro area for green restaurants it pulled up atleast 100 restaurants - pretty impressive.

The next website I encountered was the Eat Well Guide . When searching it I typed in the UT zip code and it came up with 40 listings within 20 miles of the zip code - now this was more of what I was looking for. The website broke down the results into categories such as bakers, farmers, restaurants, etc and showed the distance from your zip code to the place. What we had the most results for was farmer's markets though which isn't surprising. Here in Knoxville I know we have the Market Square Farmer's Market every Saturday morning and also UT hosts a farmer's market on the ag campus every Wednesday from 4 to 7, May through October. When I viewed all of the results together, it listed many places that I've been to many times in Knoxville: Tomato Head (yum pesto!), Golden Roast Cafe (so close to UT's campus), Coffee and Chocolate (so good), and Fresh Market (where I would grocery shop if I weren't a broke college student). The only thing was that there wasn't a criteria such as the other website had to help you determine just how eco-friendly these places are. The coolest feature about the website is that it has a search engine for traveling where if you type in your starting point and then your destination it will show you sustainable eating all the way on your trip. I typed in my house as the starting point and my cousin's house in Florida as the ending point. It had 195 results! And it even had a cool map showing all of the places along our route where we could stop to eat. Yum. So much good food. 

P.S. If you ever happen to be in London, Cornwall, or anywhere in the UK and want to find some good sustainable restaurants there, I came across The Sustainable Restaurant Association which lists sustainable restaurants for the UK!