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What kind of an eater are you?

From locavores to femivores, to fast food junkies and punk domestics, here are 11 labels for every kind of person at the dinner table.

5. Locavore

Dennis Chamberlin
Left to right, Colette Hll Vander Plas, Chris Corbin (on tractor), Matt Parker and Sally Gran, harvesting carrots at Table Top Farm in Nevada, Iowa. This was the first year for Corbin and Gran to farm vegetables. Vander Plas is one of their first employees and Parker is a friend of Gran's who was helping them harvest the carrots for the CSA shares that they were delivering that week.

  • By Stir It Up! editors

In an age of increasingly globalized food sources, locavores are sort of the luddites of food. Individual locavores set up a territorial radius and then roam it daily, looking for high-nutrition/high calorie foods such as nuts, berries, grubs, salmon, and deer. This will help them store fat for the coming winter months… wait, those are bears. Locavores are surprisingly similar though.

Most locavores will only eat food that has been grown within a 100-mile radius of where they live and prefer to eat in-season food, even if that means bunches of kale in the summer and endless root vegetables in the winter. The reasons behind this approach are two-fold: supporting local businesses and reducing their carbon footprint at the same time. You’ll find lots of them shopping at your local co-ops and farmers’ markets, and investing in community-supported agriculture (CSAs).

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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