Edible Magazine

"I want farmers to be as famous as rock stars", says Jill Lightner, the editor of the new foodie quarterly, Edible Seattle.  As the grandson and son of Wisconsin farmers, this sounds like my kind of magazine!  So I rushed over to Metropolitan Market near the Space Needle, as soon as I heard it was on the newsstands.  (They don't yet have it at Whole Foods or PCC, at least when I called this weekend).

They focus on locally grown food, which of course always comes down to farmers like the people behind wooly pigs (featured in the first issue), or chickens (how to raise them in your back yard!). I can't wait till they do something with dairy farms and raw milk (hey maybe they could get my 90-year-old grandma to tell them how to milk a cow by hand--the way she showed me when I was a kid). It appears that most of the contributors have web pages and blogs, making it easy to follow up if you see something really interesting.

The $5 price tag is worth it for the excellent summaries of the local food calendar (which foods are in season and when), the farmers markets (they list Mercer Island's too), and various gems like the Tofu Restaurant on Jackson I didn't know sells its own tofu fresh every day.  (Unfortunately, an apparent typo in the magazine didn't list the shop's name, so I'll have to try calling or visiting them, maybe when I'm near there next Saturday).  I liked the "news bites" summary, which among other things was the first place I'd heard that distillery laws are changing this year, enabling smaller producers to get into the business.

The publisher has been putting out regional food magazines for a long time in other parts of the country for a long time.  I think I first heard about them in San Francisco, or maybe it was Portland, so it's nice they finally have one for us too.