19,335,283 members doing good!

shares

share your passions, stories, inspirations, and more

Getting Good, Local Food on the iPhone
Jun 23, 2009

By Paul McRandle

When I decided to join the 21st century and picked up a new iPhone, the lure of the iApp topped my list of reasons (if not excuses) to make the purchase.  And among the heap available free or for little money, I was intrigued by those dealing with food—how to find local foods, what’s in my food and what it’s all going to cost.  With  maps and a compass on the 3GS phones, I got to wondering if I could track down raw milk, find stands of unpicked wild mushrooms, scan bar codes for environmental details or at least locate the nearest the farmers market. Not quite, but there are some interesting options available.

Locavore ($2.99)
At $2.99, Locavore is a bit more expensive than the average iPhone application, but the promise of tracking in-season food, use of NRDC ’s and Local Harvest’s excellent databases, and its ability to detect where you are is enticing.  In some ways, it stands up.  The in-season list of produce not only shows you what’s available in your area, but lists items by how little time remains before they go out season. For instance, there are only two more weeks left in the strawberry-growing season in New York state—good to know if you want to stock up and freeze fresh, puréed strawbs. There’s also a coming attractions list of fruit and veg soon to be in season, which will literally whet your appetite. And you can browse by food item, the main interest of which is seeing where items like broad beans or cardoons are growing (and if you don’t know what cardoons are, Locavore provides a link to Wikipedia entry as well).

Locavore, however, is lacking some important items provided by cheaper apps, the most obvious of which is a shopping list.  Furthermore, it only provides fruit and vegetable listings. If you want to find local fish, meat or milk you’re out of luck. It will show you which markets are nearby, but you can’t search for markets in other locales and though I live about 7 miles from Manhattan’s biggest farmers’ market by far, at Union Square, that listing doesn’t show up among the 26 green markets that appear for my area (which includes some farther away). More annoying still, it lists all markets in an area regardless of whether they are open or not—10 out of the 26 markets that popped up won’t open until July.

$2.99 isn’t much, but this app needs more to do more work itself and rely less on links to external databases to make it really worthwhile.

Farm Fresh NYC ($2.99)
Produced by Thinkenhaus, Farm Fresh NYC is much more local and a better value than Locavore if you happen to live in New York City’s five boroughs. It provides in-season listings of produce as well as seafood, but like Locavore skips meat and dairy. Within its seafood listings, Farm Fresh NYC includes warnings for high mercury in swordfish and tilefish but not for tuna, and it notes that flounder and cod are overfished but not monkfish. These inconsistencies make it a not terribly reliable guide either for health or environmental concerns.

That said, Farm Fresh does provide a grocery list as well as a list for items you are waiting to arrive in season.  Its farmers market directory covers markets in every borough, listing them by neighborhood and will drop a pin in a Google Map to show you where the market is. Strangely for a product that lists seafood, it does not give listings of fishmongers in the city.

As useful as it is, it’s a shame Farm Fresh only covers New York City now, but Thinkenhaus promises upcoming versions for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans.

iLocavore (free)
Produced by Oh My Brain, iLocavore is free and that’s just as well. Providing national listings without taking advantage of the iPhone’s geolocation abilities, iLocavore forces users to drill deep down in its menu system. It took four steps to get from Products & Producers to Fruit & Vegetables and then I was confronted by a random list of items ranging from A Perfect Pair (available in Napa, California) to the Winter Green Farm in Noti, OR.  Lacking a search tool, iLocavore makes finding find produce in my area a fruitless venture. However, I can learn that there are 17 Dazbog Coffee Company locations in Denver, Colorado—all listed individually on the Coffee Shops page.  Unfortunately for a local food app, this one drowns in its own information, proving itself about equally useless no matter where you might be.

Good Guide (free)
Years in the making, the Good Guide is the brainchild of a University of California, Berkeley professor of environmental and labor policy. The focus of the guide is its rating system, which evaluates over 70,000 products according to health, environmental and fair labor criteria, giving them all scores ranging from 0 (worst) to 10 (best). Unfortunately, the rating system isn’t complete yet for many food items so, for example, environmental and labor data aren’t included for fruit.  This means that organic nectarines score higher (at 10) than fresh conventional nectarines (8.4) but Fair Trade bananas and coffee aren’t even listed. The search function works well, but the huge number of products makes it tedious to track down items while you’re in the store elbowing your way among other shoppers. Furthermore, because the Good Guide is so specific in it selecting individual products (it has separate listings for Seventh Generation’s Grape fruit and lemon dishwasher gels), there are a large number of items for which you won’t find listings.  All in all, this app is more useful to browse through while at home than to try to grab quick appraisals on the fly.

Unique among these apps, Good Guide lets you create a user profile where you can store a lists of favorite products and products to avoid.  However, it provides no local information or mapping, which means that you’ll still have to hunt down on your own where to find the best-rated items. And though there are bar code scanner programs out available for the iPhone, none sync up yet with Good Guide’s databases. But you can forgive these weaknesses in a free app and hope for improvements to come.

Whole Foods Markets (free)
If you’re a fan of Whole Foods Markets, they have created their own recipe app which allows you to find foods by diet type (low-sodium, gluten-free, sugar-conscious, etc.), the type of meal you’re planning (quick and easy, budget, entertaining, etc.) and the course. It’s handy to be able to look up foods for these specialty diets, but Epicurious and other recipe apps handle similar sorts of information. Still, many of the recipes—such as home-made peach-mango popsicles—look appetizing and can be saved to a favorites list. Happily, the branding isn’t too obtrusive either (though it does map all Whole Foods stores in your area), so this app has its uses.

Shopper ($.99)
I had the most fun with this application even though it told me nothing about finding local, healthy foods. The point behind shopper is to create shopping lists for different stores, allowing you to keep track of what you need and how much you will spend at each. Unlike most of the other apps here, this is one I can use at the store just like a shopping list.  However, the user has to be willing do some data entry via the iPhone touch screen pad—not the quickest way to note that bananas cost 89 cents per pound.  Over time and with some patience, I’m sure I could type in most of the products I get on any given shopping trip. Unfortunately, my local stores change their prices so frequently, that I suspect the totals will essentially become estimates from the moment they’re entered. That said, Shopper is very simple to navigate and because it can be so easily customized will be useful for the varied needs of most consumers. Not surprisingly, it’s quite popular.

Photo Credit: Paul McRandle
Visibility: Everyone
Posted: Tuesday June 23, 2009, 12:20 pm
Tags: food local organic sustainable iphone Apps [add/edit tags]

Group Discussions start a discussion
Comments

Author

Simple Steps
Author Tools:
Compose New Share
female, age 30, single
New York, NY, USA
SIMPLE'S SHARES
Jan
19
(0 comments  |  discussions )
So many sad stories have come to me since I started working to eliminate toxic chemicals, which can harm people or poison pets, from common flea control products. Many people have written me about their beloved pet who died or became seriously ill af...
Oct
20
(0 comments  |  discussions )
By Solvie KarlstromLonger nights, hollowed out gourds, random celebrities showing up at your doorstep demanding candy—yes, Halloween is upon us again. As a celebration (or contest) of creativity, All Hallow's eve is unmatched and helping out wi...
Sep
17
(0 comments  |  discussions )
By Wendy Gordon While it is true the United States has some of the best drinking water in the world, a disturbing new report conducted by The New York Timesrevealed that one in ten Americans has been exposed to drinking water that contains dang...
Sep
15
(0 comments  |  discussions )
While we’ve been enjoying summer in the Northern hemisphere, flu season has been raging in the Southern and in that time “swine” flu (or the H1N1 flu strain) has become the dominant flu strain, spreading four times more quickly than...


ads keep care2 free
SHARES FROM SIMPLE'S NETWORK
May
4
(0 comments  |  discussions )
Allow me to comment on pages Care2
(0 comments  |  discussions )
JAPAN CELEBRATES NATURE
(0 comments  |  discussions )
HOPE ALL MY MEXICAN FRIENDS HAD A LOVELY DAY
May
3
(0 comments  |  discussions )
We are all humans. We all have needs. If our needs are not being met, we move into action in order to get those needs met. Maslov's Basic Hierarchy had five levels. The new extended levels are more numerous.  What level of needs are be...
(0 comments  |  discussions )
"Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker, author, actor and political commentator. He is the director and producer of three of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, and Bowling for Columbine. .. .


ads keep care2 free
MORE MEMBER BLOGS
May 24
Blog: Keokuk IA: URGENT SUPER SWEET female Husky by Liz M.
(0 comments  |  discussions ) — From: Anissa Sadeghi <sadeghi@mchsi.com> Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 5:30 AM Subject: Keokuk, IA: URGENT: SUPER SWEET female husky   Please contact me at westhancockk9@mchsi.com if you can help! Beautiful, incredibly swee... more
Blog: What’s the Real Cost of Your Lighting Choices? [Infographic] by Jeff M.
(0 comments  |  discussions ) — What are the real differences between incandescents, CFLs, and LEDs? Are the latter two really cheaper in the long run? A new infographic spells out the differences. No related posts. more
Blog: Say cheese! NASA Mars rover photographs own shadow by mark s.
(0 comments  |  discussions ) — Even robots like to have fun. NASA's rover on Mars showed off its playful side by snapping a picture of its own shadow. It's the latest self-portrait since the rover, named Opportunity, landed on the red planet in 2004. more
Blog: 'Normal' 2012 Hurricane Season Predicted by mark s.
(0 comments  |  discussions ) — The outlook for the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season is "normal to near-normal," according to researchers who unveiled their predictions for the number and severity of storms likely to spin up over the Atlantic basin in the coming months. more
Blog: Australia's Got Talent Season 6 Episode 12 Online | Watch Australia's Got Talent Season 6 Episode 12 S06E12 Free Streaming by Jimy R.
(0 comments  |  0 discussions ) — Australia's Got Talent Season 6 Episode 12 Online | Watch Australia's Got Talent Season 6 Episode 12 S06E12 Free StreamingAustralia's Got Talent 6x12, Australia's Got Talent Semi-Finals 3, Australia's Got Talent s06e12, Australia's Got Talent Season ... more
 
Content and comments expressed here are the opinions of Care2 users and not necessarily that of Care2.com or its affiliates.
Copyright © 2012 Care2.com, inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved