Washington area restaurants and food markets increasingly cater to the organic, locavore and slow food movements

The Soupergirl storefront in Takoma Park (All photos by Karen Carstens)

Soupergirl is a superhero for the slow food, locavore and sustainable farming movements, bringing bowls of piping hot goodness to hungry Washingtonians who want to eat right, but do not always have enough time to whip up fresh, organic meals at home.



A family business that exemplifies the motto "doing good by doing well"

Soupergirl, a soup pick-up and delivery restaurant, is the brainchild of Sara Polon, a former tech executive, stand-up comedian and travel consultant.

Soupergirl's Black Bean Sweet Potato Chili

Together with her mother, Marilyn Polon, a.k.a. Soupermom - who develops vegan, kosher soup recipes using fresh ingredients from local farms - she is on a mission to sell good-for-you food and respect our planet.

Soupergirl's menu changes daily based on whatever is in season. All biodegradable scraps and compostable containers are deposited in compost bins at the conservation-minded building in Takoma Park where the store - opened in September 2011 - is located.

Recently I scarfed down a bowl of Black Bean Sweet Potato Chili there. I piled it high with toppings - croutons, herbs, almonds - and added a few dashes of hot sauce. It was hearty, filling - and downright delicious.

Healthy options used to be few and far between ...

But it has not always been easy to find such healthy dining options in the Washington Metropolitan Area, as graphic designer Amy Ver Hague, who commutes every weekday to downtown DC from Vienna, Va., has found in the past.

... but now there are more choices, from organic salad to vegan cupcakes

Graphic designer and DC commuter Amy Ver Hague

One way busy commuters like Amy can eat more sustainably - beyond packing a homemade, organic lunch, that is - is to seek out salad bars such as Sweetgreen or restaurants such as Founding Farmers.

Owned by a collective of American family farmers, Founding Farmers aims to "offer farm-inspired American true food and drink in a modern, casual and eco-friendly setting."

Unlike Soupergirl or the wildly popular vegan Sticky Fingers Bakery in Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, however, meat is also on the menu here - having dined there carnivorously myself I can personally attest to its tastiness.

My friend Amy meanwhile has discovered a healthy, omnivorous, cafeteria-style lunch venue called Litestars, located on L Street just a few blocks from her office.



Like Soupergirl, Litestars is also a family business, run by Annie and Didier Leconte, along with their son Eric. The recipes at Litestars were crafted by Annie, a native of France, who "imagined creating a restaurant that would provide Americans with healthier alternatives," according to the Litestars Web site.

Farmers markets, CSA's are good ways to "eat local"

Going green inside the Soupergirl store

As consumers become more aware of how to shop, eat and dine out sustainably, organically, and locally, restaurants and food service providers appear to be adapting accordingly.

Clearly, this kind of food is here to stay.

A Google search for "Washington DC Organic Restaurants," for instance, yields an urbanspoon listing of more than 50 places.

Today's conscientious consumer can moreover shop for fresh produce at local farm markets or receive farm-fresh deliveries from a CSA.

FRESHFARM markets, for instance, represents 11 producer-only farmers markets in the Washington region.

If this is a response to globalization - even if eating 100 percent locally may not always be feasible in today's globalized world - then surely it is a positive one.

These local folks obviously favor the local food movement in this promotional spot for an Eat Local First campaign that included a "Farm-to-Table Restaurant Week" in July 2011:

You Tube Video: Eat Local First DC - do you eat local?

Storify, paywalls and niche publications could counteract 'filter failure'

Digital media guru Clay Shirky has identified "filter failure" - versus "information overload" - as a key challenge facing society today.

The economics of the digital age have made this possible: At no other point in human history, even though we have actually experienced information overload since printed books first became widely available in the 16th century, has it been so inexpensive for anyone to produce any kind of information anytime.

As Shirky puts it: "There's no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish." 

New filters needed

What this means for users of new media is that the traditional "filters" of yesteryear - such as publishers who sought to print only the most marketable books, lest they incur financial losses - are no longer in place.

So how can journalists help people overcome this new phenomenon of "filter failure," while at the same time attracting users to their own "product" via digital platforms?

Always be a reliable source

In the past, journalists followed fixed news cycles that no longer really exist. Beyond updating breaking news stories online, many reporters will now, for instance, provide up-to-the-minute "live" tweets from courtrooms as verdicts unfold or upload files from mobile devices directly to news sites.

The best way to build a reputation as a reliable source is to produce good content in a timely fashion.

This part should be a no-brainer: To drive traffic to their own sites, all media folk still need to stick to the basic nuts and bolts of good journalism and apply these fundamental tenets to a user-friendly format, including clear headlines, good ledes and nut grafs, concise subheadings and short grafs throughout (bar of course for long-form features and less time-sensitive content, such as most items published, for instance, in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, or Teen Ink).

Think in terms of the sum of a sites' multimedia parts

Now, however, all of this content must be packaged online - not to mention formatted to fit mobile devices - in an appealing way. Simply posting "shovelware" just doesn't cut it anymore.

Incorporating interactive elements, such as video or audio files, usually helps draw traffic to your site.

Using social media, including Twitter and Facebook updates might moreover expand your audience, boost today's "two-way conversation" between journalists and the public, and generally keep people - some of whom have taken on roles as "citizen journalists" - talking about your coverage.

At the same time, overdoing it could have the opposite effect, so best practices ideally should be identified.

This need to get the balance right has produced "The Rise of the Social Media Editor," as Saya Weissman recently reported for Digiday in an interview with new AP Social Media Editor Eric Carvin.

"Social media helps us see what people are interested in, what they are commenting on. Social media allows us to go to the public for news tips, eyewitness accounts, amateur videos. It’s a tool that makes journalism better if you know how to use it," said Carvin. 

Use new interfaces like Storify to aggregate disparate strands of information

Journalists can also help users in search of a one-stop-shop for accurate information by harnessing the power of nifty new tools such as Storify.

As reported in April 2011 by Claire Cain Miller for The New York Times "filtering the social web" can help journalists present news items via startups such as Storify, as well as Storyful, Tumblr and Color.

Fans of Storify include ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell, who has hailed it as "the best way to gather tweets, comments, snippets and images from all around the Web and put them into one post." 

"Form follows funding"

One way newspapers, in particular, can help readers overcome filter failure is by providing paywalls for content - a trend predicted by industry experts to now be on the rise with the "appification" of media via mobile devices.

Shirky, for instance, in a recent blogpost entitled "Newspapers, Paywalls and Core Users" suggests that "form follows funding."

This means that as paywalls increasingly appear, only the more serious "politically engaged readers" will be willing to invest in this particular content. As a result, newspapers will start providing better content as they "figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival."

So this possible trend, in and of itself, could serve as a kind of "filter." 

Find your niche

Niche publications - focused on topics ranging from restaurants to antiques to travel - moreover have begun to flourish across today's digital media landscape like a riotous cacophony of dazzling wildflowers carpeting once barren grasslands after monsoon rains.

People interested in the latest tech trends, for instance, will likely follow sites such as TechCruch or ReadWriteWeb, or perhaps check out the recently launched Pandodaily. If they find it informative, it might eventually become one of their favorites, just as Politico has become indispensible to many political junkies.

Cultivate hyperlocal habits

Another trend is hyperlocal journalism. If hyperlocal sites are good, they will attract advertising and users. A popular hyperlocal site in Washington, D.C., for instance, is Prince of Petworth.

By focusing on very specific topics, hobbies, passions, pet peeves or geographic locations, both niche products and hyperlocal sites help users zero in on the information that most interests them individually. It's like an information "smörgåsbord" with everyone invited to the dinner table.

Filter, filter, filter ...

At the end of the day no one can ever possibly read or view everything online that might be of interest to them. People essentially need to act as their own personal "filters" much more so than they did in the past.

According to Shirky search engines such as Digg and Delicious, to a certain extent, have replaced the old "filters" of a bygone era.

But search engines alone do not a brand spanking new filtration system make. On a much deeper level, this is "not a design problem" but rather "more of a mental shift" that is required, according to Shirky.

A lot of how we find new filters is going to center "around rethinking social norms," he suggests.

So we should not ask ourselves "what's happened to the information?" but "what filter just broke, what was I relying on before that stopped functioning?" according to Shirky. "Because when you start asking that question, you're going to get some clue as to where to put the design effort."

Adapt, adapt, adapt ...

Journalism today is no longer a one-way conversation, but a two-way street, including seemingly endless possibilities for dialogue via various fora than ever before.

The part that journalists play in this ever evolving process will need to be continuously revisited and redefined as new technologies open up new avenues of information flow.

Honey, I shrunk our social media!

Like the chocolate that unwittingly collides with the peanut butter in the classic Reese's candy ads on television (or was it the other way around?), Facebook was bound to run into the wonderful world of mobile devices - a match made in heaven.

As more and more people leave their PC's behind for portable smartphones and tablets it was only a matter of time before they began using social media on these mobile devices, which are in turn impacting how we engage with one another using social media - now we can, for instance, "geolocate" friends, family and even potential dates while on the go with our smartphones.

According to a report from Juniper Research, as cited at marketwatch.com, "the continuing increase in smartphone adoption and the rise of geosocial networking will push the number of mobile social media users from 650 million (in 2011) to 1.3 billion by 2016; more than the total number of social media users on all platforms today."

The report, moreover, as cited at technorati.com, found "the trend to integrate social, local and mobile experiences is driving the geosocial phenomena. People want to find out not only what their friends are doing, but also their location and other available activities in the area. Geosocial networks are particularly suited to the mobile space as most smartphones now include GPS, and have an 'always on, always connected' experience."

The technorati.com story also cites a separate survey on mobile content consumption that underscores how our attention spans are even lower on mobile devices than they used to be on the bigger screens of PC's.

According to this Digital News Test Kitchen smartphone user survey of 517 college students at the University of Colorado and several other universities and colleges around the U.S. users typically consumed, as summed up by technorati.com:

a) Less than three paragraphs of text
b) Less than 30 seconds of audio
c) Less than one minute of video

The social and digital media research firm mediabadger, moreover, has underscored that "older folk" are also getting in on the act, not just college kids and Millennials: "Generation X and Boomers alike are increasingly using mobile phones. And we found that overall, they are more likely (62%) to use a mobile device to post to social networking services such as Facebook."

Marketing expert Heidi Cohen has also cited some interesting key mobile social media facts:

1) "Social media usage on mobile devices continues to grow with 49.4million users projected in 2011; a 27% increase from 2010 according to eMarketer."

2) "Social media network usage on mobile internet and mobile phones continues to increase as a percentage of users. This is attributable to the fact that participants view social media as a communications format."

Facebook, meanwhile, "expects its next 1 billion users to come mainly from mobile devices, rather than desktop computers," according to a recent financialpost.com report by Tech Desk Editor Matt Hartley on "Facebook's looming mobile conundrum."

This article, which focuses on the advertising dilemma Facebook, er, faces, as more and more users go mobile, underscores Facebook's need to come up with a new "mobile strategy" just as Facebook went public on February 1, 2012 and outlined its own new vision for itself. 

"Increasingly, Facebook’s ardent users are checking in via mobile devices. In December, 2011, 425 million users checked into Facebook from a mobile device at least once, more than half the company’s global user base," Hartley reports, adding that this could be Facebook's "biggest problem" - from an advertising standpoint, that is.

While this very well may be the case for Facebook as a company, it bodes well for Apple and other makers of mobile devices on the market.

The upshot: Mobile devices are influencing how we engage with one another via social media and possibly even shaping our social behavior through geosocial networks.