Travel is broadening, even the reading

I've just finished being on the road for two-and-a-half weeks out of the past four, so I have more travel-related sustainability stories than I could tell in a single blog post. In fact, it would probably take a month's worth of posts scattered over the next year to recount all the notable incidents and information.

That written, each of the two trips yielded fascinating discoveries of articles about sustainability in unexpected places.

My first discovery was in a bookstore in Mexico City's International Airport, where I ran into Monacle, a very high-end magazine that I'd never heard of before. The cover story of the issue on the stands was about the global future of food. Here's the blurb from the issue page.

Opener: The Future of Food - Global
Can "big food" companies help chart a fresh future for food retail? Or are supermarkets always bad?

I loved the article and thought seriously about buying the magazine, but found out that I would have had to pay the peso equivalent of more than $20 instead of the cover price of $10, so I passed. Even so, a great find.

I saw the second while waiting in a hair salon in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Instead of settling for the sports magazines in the waiting room, I searched for something a little more challenging. I found it in an issue of Entrepreneur, which featured a series of articles on local food becoming a major economic sector. Here's the conclusion of Editor's Note: The New Food Chain by Amy Cosper.

Sometimes entire economies need reinventing, which is increasingly apparent as we watch ours take a global pounding. Housing and jobs reports sound as gloomy as a Pink Floyd album. It's time to step back and reimagine the possibilities of what we can be--to stop trying to re-create what we were. It's time to take a decidedly more entrepreneurial approach to how we view our economy.

That means we must avert our gaze from the political proscenium and refocus on possibilities--specifically, possibilities in local economies. This month we look at a sector doing just that. With a solid nod to dirt, soil and manure, we explore local farming, farm-to-table, locavores--trends that are helping define a new local economy.

If you've been reading Crazy Eddie's Motie News for a while, you'll see this is right up my alley, so of course I read the featured articles. Here are the links to them.

How the Farm-to-Table Movement Is Helping Grow the Economy

Two Urban Farmers Test the 'Eat Local' Business

I highly recommend reading both of them.

I was so taken by the articles that I asked the shop owner if I could take the issue home with me. To my pleasant surprise, she said yes. Free magazine! That certainly made up for the overpriced copy of Monocle that I passed up in Mexico City.