By now, many savvy local foodies in the Bay Area have heard of the website Good Eggs. Officially launched last July, the website aims to connect local farmers, ranchers, and food artisans to consumers by providing an Etsy-like online shopping and delivery service. Originally designed to allow small San Francisco-based producers to streamline their production and sales, the site expanded as of March 1 to offer groceries to anyone from the Peninsula to the East Bay to Marin.

Good Eggs holds high standards for their chosen food producers. Not only are they expected to sell organic and local products, they must provide transparency regarding their sourcing and/or growing practices to their consumers. According to Good Eggs, transparency between producer and consumer helps to strengthen relationships across the food community and to bolster the local food system. This, they believe is good for the environment and food politics as a whole. As they explain on their website: “We’re certain that better food is a means to a better world. As people get more of their food from local systems — systems built on caring for the land, the animals and the people in them — we believe that we’ll see real change.”

But these types of standards are nothing new in the enviro-conscious Bay Area, and much of the food found on Good Eggs’s site is also sold in farmers’ markets and grocery stores all around the Bay. For those of us living in the particularly rich food shopping mecca of the East Bay, the big question concerning Good Eggs is: Is the service worth it? Are the groceries that much better than what one could purchase at a moment’s notice from the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Monterey Market, The Local Butcher Shop, or Monterey Seafood Market? Is this service really just a lazy person’s chance to eat farm fresh veggies? … Continue reading »