Eat Local

I was wandering around Queen Anne the other day with Laura, and stumbled across Eat Local, a brand new store emphasizing the use of local and sustainable ingredients to make prepared meals. Well, and not only sustainable ingredients, but sustainable packaging, as well. They're currently using corn plastic (a biodegradeable, non-petroleum thing, that looks and feels a lot like regular old plastic, to me... how cool is that?), and then they're also using re-usable glass containers for some stuff, which you "buy" with a deposit, but you get it back in full when you return the container as you're purchasing your next thing. Greg (the owner) says they're going to be working towards having the glass containers for all their products, eventually.

Combine the latter with a Re-usable shopping bag, like the acme bag Laura got for each of us recently, and you have a zero-waste frozen meal!

Which brings us to the one arguable downside of the place -- it seems to only offer frozen prepared meals. Now, this is a good thing, too, it just might be nice if they had non-frozen stuff as well. Then again, there are other markets around for such things, and so it's fine with me if Eat Local is filling a niche that doesn't include that. They do have some non-frozen items like jams and such. They also have frozen items for a variety of meal sizes, and some pottery (locally made), books that are on-topic, and some other stuff.

They even have a meeting space upstairs which is free for bookclubs and non-profits. Pretty cool. I wish them only the best of success... I expect I'll be back there soon to make some purchases of some sort or other. With my Acme Bag in pocket.