I do love that line: “Locavores’ Delight.©” We might have coined it, but obviously we used The Omnivores Dilemma as our inspiration. Locavore was the 2007 Word of the Year for the Oxford American Dictionary. In our lingo, it means a person who likes to eat food near where it was grown or made. It also describes a movement that “encourages consumers to buy from farmers, farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh and local ingredients are more nutritious and taste better.” We think that these are good ideas. We’ve long felt that the nearer the farm to the fork, the better the flavor©. Most also say that this local idea is better environmentally because it uses less transportation, and thus energy, to ship the food from further away. We have been playing this Locavore thing big time in our restaurants for years. About six years ago, we went so far as to buy a truck to run around and pick food up from local farmers and markets. But it just didn’t make practical sense. It wasn’t sustainable from a business perspective. (It ain’t sustainable to go broke!) Now we are buying even more local food by using some of our outstanding local friends and vendors like the Goat Lady Dairy, Giacomo’s, Red Oak Brewery, Carolina Classic Catfish, Chapel Hill Creamery, North Carolina wineries and a really cool outfit called Eastern Carolina Organics. ECO brings us wonderful local veggies most of the year from a network of farms across North Carolina. We wish that we could buy more things like chicken and beef from local growers. We do buy some, but so far the availability and price still don’t make it practical.