This Farm-to-Table App Will Transform the Way You Dine Out

Consider this: You stock up at your local farmers’ market every weekend, frequent the aisles of Whole Foods, and scan packaging labels. Yet, when it comes to dining out, you eat what’s on your plate often without knowing where the ingredients came from—a conundrum that’s been largely unavoidable, until now. Thanks to the launch of Aura, a new app, which lists restaurants that source organic produce from local farmers, eating fresh has never been so easy.

“I felt like a hypocrite,” explains founder Kristin Zecher. “I was all about organic food, but when I dined out I had no idea if it was frozen or two weeks old, where it came from, if it had hormones and pesticides, et cetera. As a New Yorker, I genuinely wanted to know.” After studying abroad in Italy, where she frequented Florence’s Mercato Centrale, a year-round indoor farmers market, she noticed that the U.S. was lagging considerably in its approach to fresh food. “I came back to New York thinking, ‘Oh, we have one of those somewhere in the city,’ but we don’t,” she laughs. And while the realization prompted Zecher to launch a long-term plan of opening indoor farmers’ markets in every major U.S. city, she began with the app, a project that she believed could have a more immediate effect on the way that we consume food.

Soon after inception, Zecher partnered with Slow Food NYC, a nonprofit organization committed to, in its words, “counteract[ing] the culture of fast food,” which had a pre-existing rating system called the Snail of Approval, “a designation given to restaurants . . . that contribute to the quality, authenticity, and sustainability of the food supply.” She also quickly established a relationship with many of the farmers of New York City’s 145 farmers’ markets, who relay to Zecher when a restaurant purchases their produce. Now, using that information, the app features 240food artisans across the five boroughs that source locally-grown, organic ingredients, a list that’s growing every day and will soon expand to other cities. “If you eat real food, you feel better, you’re healthier, you’re happier, and you’re giving off this better aura,” Zecher explains of the origin of the app’s name. Ultimately, however, she has one goal: “I want to create a paradigm shift in the way that Americans buy and consume food. I genuinely believe that if we all had a more convenient outlet to buy local, real food, then we would.”

 

The post This Farm-to-Table App Will Transform the Way You Dine Out appeared first on Vogue.