Isabelle Pinard
Managing Editor

Eating locally-grown food is becoming more frequent in San Francisco with the rise of grocery stores and restaurants that only offer local produce, meats and dairy products.

“I can buy a wide variety of local food in a lot of places here in the city,” senior Katie Burke said. “I’m a vegetarian so buying fresh produce is important to me and I’m glad there are so many resources.”

Rainbow Grocery, a San Francisco Green Business, is one of those sources. It follows the set standards of the San Francisco Department of the Environment and focuses is to preserve and strengthen the organic standards, according to its website.

“Rainbow Grocery is a fantastic place to get fruits and vegetables,” senior Burke said. “The products taste great and its really nice for me not to worry about pesticides in their food when purchasing groceries from their stores.”

The store opposes the use of genetically-modified food and banned those products from all the private labels they carry, and promotes Fair Trade Certified products producers to receive a fair price for their goods, benefiting over 800,000 farmer organized into cooperative unions in 48 countries.

“I didn’t think that buying local foods could make such a difference in my diet, but I’m proud to say that I’m a locavore,” customer Brandi Harely from Half Moon Bay said. “I think that buying locally really means that what you get is fresh and there is just something different in the taste.”

Locavores, like Harely, are a group of people who try to eat food that is locally produced no more than a hundred mile radius from San Francisco.

“My friend and I came from Vancouver and we decided to visit the farmers market here in San Francisco,” tourist Vincci, who asked for her last name to not be used, said at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. “We saw so many people and even chefs come out to buy this local produce — it was a great experience.”

The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is operated by the nonprofit Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture. The market supplies local ingredients to nearly 25,000 shoppers who visit the farmers market each week.

“Whenever I walk through the rows and rows of food at the Market I always find myself stopping to look at just how lush and healthy the produce is,” Latham said. “It’s amazing that at the market, the food does taste as good as it looks.”

The Plant organic café on the corner of Steiner and Chestnut Street allows its customers to taste healthy food choices to its fullest, according Aram Bedrossian.

“I really enjoy eating here at the Plant,” Bedrossian said, while pointing to the burger in front of him. “Every time I visit, the menu always has something new, plus everything is local so people can really get to taste San Francisco at its best.”

The Plant’s California cuisine menu uses with 100 percent local ingredients. Its produce is picked seasonal from the Northern California from farms like the Twin Girls Farm in Fresno and County Line Harvest in Marin County.

“The whole local food deal used to be a drag for me because of the limited choices with just a handful of grocery stores and restaurants,” Bedrossian said. “Now, there are so many choices all around the city, that can really get people engaged in eating local like Local Harvest.”

The Local Harvest is a website that allows users to find close organic food grown. The categories are online stores, farms, Community Supported Agriculture, farmers’ markets, restaurants and grocery stores.

A map on the website shows where organic farms are located. All a user needs to do is type in the city and county, then click search to find a list of possible places to get organic local foods with ratings, pictures, information and reviews.

“The amount of options there are here in the city for fresh local produce is incredible,” Burke said. “It is really says something about the people, when a community like San Francisco promotes the importance of locally grown food through so many areas such as education, stores and restaurants.”