Our August issue, out now, includes a fun guide to local flavors with delicious in-season recipes  from 15 locavore chefs. We tapped all 15 for their favorite local ingredients and had trouble whittling their generous suggestions down to a mere 45 . To round the list out to an even 50, here are five more, traveling across the U.S. from east to west:

1. Nesenkeag Farm
Tony Maws of Craigie Street Bistrot in Cambridge, MA, gets fresh cranberry beans from this charitable, nonprofit organic farm in New Hampshire; it also hosts an annual on-farm poetry reading.

2. Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket
Everyone knows about Manhattan’s Union Square Greenmarket, but all the cool people (like chef Andrew Feinberg of Franny’s) go to this Brooklyn location on Saturdays for its Ronnybrook Farm Dairy milk and Blue Moon trout.

3. The Velvet Tango Room
Douglas Katz of Cleveland’s Fire Food & Drink gives the nod to Paulius Nasvytis and Orva Fuston’s bar for its fantastic “local” cocktails with house-made bitters and vermouths.

4. Jolie Vue Farms
At this Houston-area farm, lawyer-rancher Glen Boudreaux feeds his free-roaming Berkshire and Duroc pigs pecans, making them “some of the tastiest pigs you’ll ever eat,” says Monica Pope of Houston’s t’afia.

5. Lagunitas IPA
Joseph Humphrey of Cavallo Point’s Murray Circle in Sausalito, CA, gets right to the point: “Nothing beats a Lagunitas IPA with cold oysters!” Amen.

I recently met up with chef Daniel Snukal from the restaurant 3 on Fourth in Santa Monica for a short chat on sustainability. The next time I looked at my watch, it was an hour-and-a-half later. The reason: Snukal's fascinating (and sometimes contrarian) take on the subject. My crib notes:

On locavorism: "Locavorism is an old-fashioned idea and doesn’t work for the way we live now. You can’t look at things as absolutes. I really get the idea of locavorism, but it’s really impractical. For a farm to deliver to 80 restaurants in Los Angeles is a lot of work and fuel and driving if they don’t have a central distribution area. With the way infrastructure is in some places, delivering produce locally might use more fuel overall than having items shipped via FedEx, since the FedEx plane would be carrying a lot of other items as well."

On seafood: Snukal is working with a farm in Trang, Thailand, to exclusively import naturally farmed (meaning no antibiotics or hormones) soft-shell crabs from a river sanctuary that’s protected by the government. He serves the crab at his restaurant and is selling it to other restaurants in California, including Sushi Roku. Snukal also likes ecologically farmed Loch Duart salmon from Cleanfish.

On beef: "Most grass-fed beef in the U.S. is just finished with grass for the cattle's last 60 days," says Snukal. Instead of domestic beef, he buys Uruguayan Estancia Beef, raised entirely on grass. (The company claims that the amount of fuel used to transport their beef to the U.S. is far less than the amount required to fatten the average U.S. feedlot steer.)

On chicken: Snukal likes a number of different chickens for braising, specifically Niman Ranch’s Poulet Rouge Fermiere, a French heritage variety, for its "tighter" meat. While Niman Ranch is currently only selling the chicken wholesale, expect it to hit stores within the next couple of months.

While the rock stars of the food and wine worlds were hanging out in Aspen last weekend, another group of rockers gathered on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, for Bonnaroo, a four-day Woodstock-esque music festival that brings together environmentally conscious performers like Pearl Jam and Jack Johnson.This year’s festival set new standards for sustainability. Diane Hatz, founder and director of Sustainable Table, the nonprofit responsible for the Eat Well Guide, blogged daily from the event and called me today to share some green highlights:

* The festival hired a sustainability coordinator to help reduce consumption.

* Bonnaroo’s goal is to buy 75 percent of all food it sells from local sources within three to five years, and festival organizers provided food vendors with a list of local farmers they could work with.

* An organic café was selling fair-trade coffee, organic fruits and vegetables, arepas and jerk chimichangas while vendors hawked organic, vegetarian corn dogs and organic funnel cake (festival-goers could pick up leftover oil from the funnel-cake fryer to fuel their biodiesel cars).

* Organic beer from Vermont brewers Orlio and Stone Mill was on tap.

* Sustainable Table volunteers were barbecuing on a solar-powered oven.

* A Solar Stage hosted bands as well as panel discussions on the state of our planet.

Last night my colleague Emily Kaiser and I gondola'd to the top of Aspen Mountain for a dinner benefiting the Wholesome Wave Foundation, the 2008 recipient of F&W's Grow for Good campaign. We enjoyed a local-minded meal prepared by chefs Roy Yamaguchi, Hung Huyhn (Top Chef's 2007 winner), Ryan Hardy and Michel Nischan, who founded Wholesome Wave last year.

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© Nick Fauchald
Butchering at The Brooklyn Kitchen

Fellow food editor Nick Fauchald and I ventured out to Williamsburg last night for The Brooklyn Kitchen’s class on hog butchering, taught by Marlow & Sons' meat master Tom Mylan.

Mylan began the class: “I sliced my arm today with my knife. Perhaps I was slightly hung over.” Yikes. While he said he felt loopier than usual thanks to all his blood loss, his blog confirms he’s always just as irreverent. Here, a few excerpts from our class:

- He broke down a pasture-raised Berkshire pig, which had gorgeous red meat. “Not like that super white meat from those boy-in-the-bubble farm animals,” he said.

- He arranged the kidney and sweetbread together on a tray he referred to as the “offal-a-go-go” pile.

- When breaking down the hog shoulder, he showed us the two popular barbecue cuts, the pork butt (the upper part of the shoulder) and the picnic ham (the lower part). When attached to the leg, the picnic ham looks a bit like the true ham, which is cut from the hind leg. To distinguish the two: “The picnic ham is the one you serve your inlaws," he said. "The real ham is for when the pastor comes to dinner.”

- He explained to us how to make head cheese (and one brave cook with a very large stockpot took it home to try). Mylan added that we could create a similar terrine with the foot. “You know, foot cheese.”

-He reduced a common food lover’s romantic vision of pasture-raising hogs—one of Nick’s post retirement dreams, in fact—to “a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall fantasy,” named after the wacky luddite British celebrity chef whose spectacular River Cottage Cookbook full of agro porn photography is just hitting shelves in the U.S. this week. 

After Mylan finished butchering the hog, the class got the divvy up the meat in a selection process more stressful than the NFL draft. Nick, who got the lucky #1 pick, generously snagged me the tail, which I’m salting now to fry up tomorrow. Perhaps it will be the next duck neck.

 P.S. Welcome to the new improved Mouthing Off. Now with pictures. Continue to see more shots of the pig but vegetarians beware. 

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I was lucky enough to be in Hawaii last weekend and got to partake in the islands' pre-Earth Day festivities and also discovered some new and delicious eco-minded food spots. Some highlights:

*Rocking out to Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews and Mason Jennings at the zero-waste, carbon-neutral Kokua Festival in Honolulu. Surfer turned filmmaker, turned rock star/eco-activist Jack Johnson created the festival five years ago to benefit the Kokua Foundation — his non-profit organization devoted to environmental education. All concerts should aspire to the festival's green principles: personal bike valets; biodiesel-powered generators; carbon offset options upon ticket purchase; concession stands selling local, sustainable drinks and snacks like salads and fruit from Pupukea Gardens; natural sodas from Waialua Soda Works and beer from Kona Brewing Company.

*Celebrating Maui Earth Day Sunday at Baldwin Beach in the hippie-chic town of Paia with live music and food from some of my favorite local restaurants like Flatbread Pizza.

*Tasting my way through the incredible flavors of gelato at Paia's new Ono Gelato. The five-month old, Italian-style gelateria sources local ingredients like apple bananas from Ono Farms, strawberry papayas from Molokai and persimmon from the Hashimoto family in Kula and makes all of its gelatos in-house. The non-fruit flavors were just as refreshing, especially Philosopher's Brew — a combination of organic herbal tea and peaches.

*Stumbling upon the awesome Laulima Farms on the way to Oheo Gulch in Hana. This 13-acre farm grows its own coffee and fruit and serves drinks and snacks at the on-site cafe/fruit stand. Customers have to hop on a bike and peddle in place if they want one of the fresh fruit smoothies which are prepared in a bicycle-powered blender.

In "Why Bother?" in the New York Times Magazine yesterday, "food detective" Michael Pollan laid out a persuasive case for why we should do something about climate change, however miniscule the deed—whether it's giving up beef or going entirely local. But the point he really wanted to get across was the importance of growing your own food, citing how, as recently as World War II, Victory Gardens supplied about 40 percent of the produce Americans ate. "Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do—to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind," he writes.

Walking around the packed Union Square Greenmarket Saturday afternoon, I like to think that New Yorkers were heeding Pollan's plea. It's too early in the season for loads of produce—I eyed heaps of root vegetables and some ramps—but it seemed like every other stall was selling herb starter containers. And people were snapping them up—whether for the fresh, full flavor only just-picked herbs can provide or for the economic efficiency of snipping just the leaves you need instead of paying $3 for a batch from the grocery store, or whether it's all in the virtuous name of climate change. (Note: I like to think all three are intertwined.)

Whatever the reason, I was astounded by the variety of herb and plant starters available, especially from Hunterdon County, New Jersey's Oak Grove Plantation, whose stall is on the west side of the market. I spotted about a dozen varieties of basil, including the spicy, anise-scented Thai Siam Queen. What's new for Oak Grove this season: Broadleaf thyme (typically found in Jamaican cuisine), Mexican cilantro, and Chinese Toon, whose young shoots and leaves supposedly give off an onion-y flavor when stir-fried. But I didn't get a chance to pick up any Toon—my hands were full of all the other herb starters I'd grabbed.

Yesterday I attended the launch of the Cool Foods Campaign, a new initiative from the Center for Food Safety and the CornerStone Campaign addresses how the food industry affects global warming (hint: It has a drastic effect; the CFS estimates that up to 25 percent of climate change can be attributed to the production and distribution of food).

At the event (held at Blue Hill restaurant, where Dan Barber served us some of his incredible whey-fed pork), I happened to sit next to the CFS’s Zach Conrad, the agency’s resident number-cruncher. Using enough equations to put a mathlete in the hospital, Conrad has been calculating the food miles and carbon footprints of all sorts of foods, and I was curious which item at the grocery store, pound for pound, was the biggest enemy of the environment. “Strawberries,” he said, his eyes widening. “It takes so many pesticides and fertilizers to grow them.” (Though Conrad stressed that genetically-engineered corn—not the sweet stuff we eat off the cob, but the stuff used to feed livestock and make corn syrup and a million other food products—is the overall biggest eco beast). He’s even working on an online tool that will let the less mathletic of us plug in a specific food to see just how green (or whatever its complementary color is—red, I guess) it is.

Recently our excellent intern, Nick Pandolfi, came back from a lunch that almost miraculously transformed him into an organic proselytizer. Here he tells what happened:

    I admit it: I’ve been a slow adopter of the organic/green movement compared to everyone else at the Food & Wine office. Even though I kept hearing about the benefits of buying organic produce I couldn't get past the cost: it’s just more expensive. The price of food has always factored into what I walk out with at the grocery store.
     But thanks to last Monday’s Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) luncheon, I think I am a 100% organic convert.  On top of the delicious all-vegetable, all-organic lunch prepared by chef John Stevenson (I had the best tasting parsnip puree and Swiss chard I’ve tasted in my life), there was an incredible panel of experts who went over the benefits of organic farming, including chef Peter Hoffman of Manhattan’s Savoy and the new Back Forty.

    Besides some distressing facts (the most commonly consumed fruits and vegetables in the U.S. are ketchup and French fries), moderator Kathy Lawrence, founder of the sustainable food organization Just Food, mentioned something else that took me by surprise: Corn-based ethanol production in the United States, which is getting a huge amount of money in government subsidies, is an “environmental disaster.” I realize that my “green” knowledge is limited, but I certainly thought ethanol was a better alternative to the fuels the U.S. is currently using. I caught up with Kathy after the panel to learn more. As she put it, the corn used for ethanol production is a “heavy feeder.”  In other words, all the fertilizer and pesticides that are used for growing the crops end up using fossil fuels, and the whole process ends up wasting more than is saved. Also, growing only corn on the same patch of land year after year depletes the soil’s natural nutrients and microorganisms that are so useful in reducing carbon in the atmosphere.

    Her solution: First, use less fuel, but more importantly, get rid of the huge corn farms, and substitute them with organic vegetables ones. Not only will the environment be better off, but our food will also taste better and we’ll be healthier. I now realize it's worth the extra money, and it might not be that much extra for long, just as long as people catch on, and more and more land is used for organic farming.  
    Peter Hoffman had one final suggestion: Put a basket on your bike and ride it to the greenmarket. It will reduce your carbon footprint and you’ll save a few dollars on gas.

Norway’s Andreas Viestad is slowly gaining global star-chef recognition as he continues to embrace diverse new culinary projects. His likable persona on public television’s New Scandinavian Cooking with Andreas Viestad has earned him comparisons to Jamie Oliver. His adventurous travels are reminiscent of a PG–rated Anthony Bourdain. And he’s also channeling a bit of Harold McGee in The Gastronomer, his new monthly column for the Washington Post, which explores how “scientific cooking” can be applied in the home kitchen. Viestad recently took a break from filming his new PBS series Perfect Day, airing this fall, to fill me in on two of his latest projects:

1) Viestad owns a farm in Elgin, South Africa, about an hour outside of Cape Town, where his focus is crop variation. This season he had about a hundred different types of tomatoes and just planted an extensive orchard that he hopes will start to bear different types of citrus (more than 50 varieties), peaches (25 varieties), figs (10 varieties), pomegranates (12 varieties) and almonds (eight varieties) by next year.

2) Having tackled the Indian Ocean Spice Route for his most recent cookbook Where Flavor Was Born, Viestad is contemplating doing his next book on the foods and ingredients found in harsh climates and fragile ecosystems. His  latest travel plans will take him to the Arctic: Northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia and even possibly the North Pole.