The USDA says 91% of U.S. farms are classified as small, usually family-run businesses, grossing less than $250,000 a year. That's a lot of local food production run on a shoestring budget, if any at all, with little to no access to customers outside of direct sales at a farmers market.

Then there are local, seasonal eaters looking for close-to-home farms, community-supported agriculture or local farmers market locations and schedules. Finding one unified, regularly updated and easy-to-reference source that connects you with nearby farmers no matter where you are in the country has been the stuff of dreams. It's also a seemingly Sisyphean task when you consider that the aforementioned 91% drops by an estimated 300-plus farms each week.

The Locavore app -- a project of Local Dirt founder Heather Hilleren -- achieves what was previously thought impossible: a seamless, well-managed and thorough app connected to a network of more than 35,000 farmers. They even get the local "what's in season" info right, down to the number of weeks left in the season, customized to your GPS-identified location. It seemed too good to be true, enough that we ran it through a serious obstacle course trying to find something wrong with it. What we found, after the jump.

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arnold | inuyaki/Flickr

Kyochon's fried chicken

​In our last handy food flowchart, we tried to point you in the right direction for those times when you just need a bowl of phở to comfort your soul. Today, our flowchart helps you navigate the city when you're in search of another type of comforting soul food: fried chicken. And because sometimes you want that chicken with a side of kimchi pancakes or Japanese pub grub, we threw in a few suggestions that will satisfy your craving by way of Koreatown or the local izakaya.

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"Know What"

Images of app

​The Computer Age. The Digital Revolution. The Information Era. Many also say it's the Food Age. We're bombarded by facts and opinions on how, what and where to eat. How to choose? That's where technology helps by putting ideas into our hands, literally. More and more, travel and food guides are looking not only to the Web to share tips but also, of course, to apps. Examples include Zagat, Yelp and Urbanspoon. And hey, even LA Weekly.

Know What, an L.A. and San Francisco travel guide with plenty of food and drink ideas, is the newest to sidestep books and websites in favor of the app. Unlike other food guides we've written about recently, it doesn't focus on one specific slant. (Clean Plates lists what it deems healthy, sustainable options, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center National Diners' Guide considers labor practices.) Instead, "Know What" gives a variety of slants, each presented as an app-within-an-app. It's geared for locals and tourists alike.

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​Clean Plates Los Angeles 2012: A Guide to the Healthiest Tastiest and Most Sustainable Restaurants for Vegetarians and Carnivores, released last week by New York City-based "health coach" Jared Koch, is more than another list of restaurant recommendations. First, the book's 52-page "Design Your Own Diet" section is intended as education for those who want to change lifestyle and eating habits. Then come the reviews, a selection of 106 dining spots including choices in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, West Hollywood and Pasadena plus the Westside, South Bay, and San Fernando Valley.

It is admirable that Koch winnowed it down to so few. (Even with the assistance of eight "talented food critics.") LA Weekly's Voiceplaces.com lists more than 20,000 in greater L.A. Koch began with a couple of hundred possibilities, according to the book. He chose restaurants serving produce from small, local farms and organic, grass-fed, free-range meat not injected with hormones or antibiotics. As well, Koch valued menus with filtered water, high-quality salts, natural sweeteners, wheat- and gluten-free options, plus plenty of vegetables.

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As we've noted before, among the many ways you can ID a food lover in this town is the presence of a mole-stained copy of EAT: Los Angeles in the glove compartment of the car.

Along with, say, a dilapidated copy of Jonathan Gold's "Essential Whatever," the Mozza2Go boxes, the super hip Ink.Sack black lunch bags, the Daikokuya chopsticks, the valet tickets from the SLS hotel, etc. So, time to upgrade, as the 2012 edition of the Los Angeles food guide comes out this Saturday, October 22.

The new edition, the fourth from Prospect Park Media in Pasadena, has all the lovely features from previous versions, plus the inclusion of Favorites, a collection of short lists of the authors' personal favorites in various categories; expanded food truck coverage; and more than 150 new reviews of places to eat, drink and/or shop. There are 1,292 listings in all.

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Paul Koob

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There are many books about cheese. There are plenty of books that depict mice, and their love of cheese. And countless children's book authors and illustrators have figured out clever ways to show the alphabet, but none with the specific dedication to dairy products and rodents as seen in A, B, Cheese!: The Alphabet Book About Cheese by Paul Koob.

While worn and grease-stained copies of The Cheese Primer and The Murray's Cheese Handbook occupy sacred space on any aficionado's shelf, Chicago-based Koob's self-published pages simplify things somewhat. The pamphlet reminds us of the most fundamental educational qualities of food, since collecting brief stories about 26 cheeses from A to Z, paired with drawings of expressive mice dressed in historical garb engaging in various cheese-centric activities, is as good a method as any to help teach the alphabet. (A glossary is also included.) And frankly, a couple of fart jokes don't hurt, either.

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Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images AsiaPac

Jean-Luc Naret at 2010 Tokyo Michelin guide press conference

There probably won't be many teary eyes in Los Angeles over today's news that Michelin guide director Jean-Luc Naret will be stepping down from his post. The Michelin guide was released in Los Angeles for the first time in 2009, but after low sales and indifferent local response, the guide has not returned since. Jean-Luc Naret was recently interviewed by Esquire's John Mariani, and explained why Michelin has ceased operations in Los Angeles, saying, "the people in Los Angeles are not real foodies. They are not too interested in eating well but just in who goes to which restaurant and where they sit."

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The Michelin Guide for New York City hits the shelves today, but don't look for a Los Angeles guide anytime soon. They didn't publish here last year, they didn't this year, and it sounds like they won't next year either. Feast got a short interview with Jean-Luc Naret, Michelin's Directeur Général (proving once again that everything sounds better in French, especially if you add a John Cleese accent, which you would in this case), who summed up his company's reasons for passing over Los Angeles again in a few pithy sentences.

Michelin did not, it seems, appreciate the reception it got here, either from the Los Angeles Times or from the rest of the public, not because we were as catty as former LAT food editor Leslie Brenner or as calmly dismissive as The Weekly's Jonathan Gold, but because we simply didn't buy the guide. Fair enough -- these are literally belt-tightening times -- but there are more damning reasons.

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Prospect Park Books

Among the top 10 ways you can ID a food lover in this town: the car radio channel set to KCRW, the amount of time racked up in the Chego parking lot, the crumpled plates from food truck visits on the back seat, a bottle of hot sauce in the glove compartment, the Jonathan Gold bobblehead doll on the desk at work (just kidding), and the salsa verde-stained copy of EAT: Los Angeles. Well, time to get an upgrade on that last one. The 2011 edition of the food guide is coming out on October 4th.

Newly updated, with some 1,300 resources for food and drink, this is the third edition of the book, which is edited and published by Colleen Dunn Bates and her Pasadena-based Prospect Park Media. The guide is written by a cadre of local food experts, including Pat Saperstein (Eating L.A.), Linda Burum (Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine), Jenn Garbee (Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly), Miles Clements (Los Angeles Times) and Amelia Saltsman (Santa Monica Farmers' Market Cookbook). Which means that they're pretty reliable, to say the least. Plus this one is red, in a handy portable size, and its cover works pretty well as a taco emergency plate.

EAT: Los Angeles 2011, Prospect Parks Books, $19.95.

Trader Joe's is really inexpensive. To be honest, it is at times somewhat frighteningly so. But we continue to shop there, mainly because of those low prices, their large wine selection, snappy packaging and generally friendly staff. It is a brand we've come to trust, without ever really stopping to figure out why. We go back no matter how crowded the parking lots become, and despite the knowledge that their dairy and produce seem to go bad a lot more quickly than they ought to. We continue to purchase their seafood, even though Greenpeace graded their seafood sustainability a solid F, below Target and Walmart and Costco.

So why do we go back? Because it's cheap, and because it is convenient. Bachelors who would never be caught dead eating a Swanson fried fish stick dinner can be found perusing the TJ's frozen food section for ten minutes at a time, reading the descriptions on a package of steamer clams in garlic butter sauce. So in honor of mankind's odd relationship with Trader Joe's, the company which can apparently do no wrong, we present our list of the 5 Most Disgusting Items In The Trader Joe's Freezer Aisle.

N. Galuten

Because we apparently need souffle faster and worse

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