We are happy to announce that our team is joining Food52 to work towards a shared vision of community building and sustainable eating. Having recently won the James Beard Award for Publication of the Year, Food52 is a pioneer among cooking websites, inspiring the everyday person to get in the kitchen. We’ve long admired what Amanda, Merrill and the Food52 team have built, and are excited to work with them to inspire people to cook, and to celebrate the ingredients they choose and where they come from.
As Food52 writes in their manifesto: “We think cooking is really important — especially now. Over the past decade, many studies and books have shown that children from families who eat together do better in school, that eating “whole” foods is healthier, that eating sustainably will save the environment. But no one has pointed out that the only way to achieve all this in a comprehensive, lasting way is for people to cook.”
If we do say so ourselves, we’re pretty geeked that the first crowd-sourced curated cooking site is partnering with the first ever crowd-sourced food guide.
In the past two years the Real Time Farms community has gathered information about thousands of farms and farmers markets, pulling in details about about goods and growing practices, as well as tens of thousands of photos. This is in no small part thanks to our more than four dozen Food Warrior Interns who have documented local food communities all across the US. We’ve been looking for just the right opportunity to make our data relevant and helpful to people on a daily basis. We will be working to make this information accessible to the 750,000 (and growing) monthly unique visitors at Food52.com in the context of cooking at home. This is an awesome opportunity to have a bigger impact than we ever could on our own.
What does this mean for RealTimeFarms.com?
Real Time Farms will continue to operate normally, serving as a repository to organize information about farms, food artisans and farmers markets. Our focus will shift towards making our website as useful as possible to organizations and individuals who invest in keeping information about farms up to date (that means data! data! data!). We will continue to communicate openly as we figure out longer-term plans with the Food52 team.
What about restaurants on Real Time Farms?
Over the past year and a half, we’ve worked hard to help eateries show their patrons exactly where each ingredient is coming from with innovative farm-linked menus. We’ve had a blast working with amazing chefs from across the country and have been blown away by their support and enthusiasm. However, we have not reached the critical mass necessary to make it as useful to consumers as we would have liked . As such, we are shifting our development resources and energies towards our partnership with Food52. Given this shift, we are no longer offering our restaurant tools to new customers.
Check out Food52’s announcement for more information.
While my love for these places of basic economic exchange runs deep, I feel weighted with pretension when I frequent the markets. Blame it on 
The Real Time Farms Blog 