Find growers, grocers and restaurants in West Michigan.
Food Near You is a tool created to help people in West Michigan find:
Our mission statement: To connect people to their local growers, grocers and restaurants.
We're starting off with a small list of sellers rather than trying to grab everything we can find. We'd rather really get to know a handful of sellers and tell you everything we know about them than give you watered-down data on every single seller we can find.
If you're not listed on here, it's not that we don't like you—we probably just haven't gotten to you yet. If you'd like to speed up the process, please drop us a line and give us your info.
Why eat food that's grown locally? Barbara Kingsolver gives us at least one good reason in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:
Most standard vegetable varieties sold in stores have been bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience of packing (e.g. square tomatoes), and a tolerance for hard travel. None of these can be mistaken, in practice, for actual flavor. Homegrown tomatoes are famously superior to their supermarket counterparts, but the disparity is just as great (in my experience) for melons, potatoes, asparagus, sweet corn, broccoli, carrots, certain onions, and the Japanese edible soybeans called edamame. I have looked for something to cull from my must-grow list on the basis of its being reasonably similar to the supermarket version. I have yet to find that vegetable.