Be a Localvore
“Localvore” usually means eating from a hundred-mile radius. I've quietly stolen the word for something else: the small kit of things I read, listen to, and scroll to find what's actually happening in a place, whether it’s my hometown of Los Angeles or somewhere I'm visiting.
The algorithms aren't going to help here. They're built to serve everyone roughly the same thing. Local, by definition, isn't.
So you assemble. Four sources, four jobs. This is mine.
Good Food (KCRW) — the curated job. Evan Kleiman has been hosting for thirty years. She's a chef, a former restaurateur, an absurdly good interviewer, and a Southern California institution in her own right. The whole episode is worth it, but the part I wait for is the end: the Farmers Market Report, where she talks to growers and chefs about what's in season this week and what they're cooking with it. Stone fruit in May. Persimmons in October. Citrus in February that will ruin you for grocery store oranges forever. The single most undersold thing about SoCal is the year-round produce, and the Farmers Market Report is a weekly reminder to actually go use it. When I travel, the first thing I do is find the local farmers market. Good Food trained me how to listen to one.
Baseball by Design — the meta job. The podcast interviews graphic designers and general managers of minor league teams about how the team identity – logos, jerseys, mascots, alternate names, color palettes – gets pulled out of the city it plays in. I've written before about why minor league baseball encodes place better than almost anything else in American life. This is a whole show built on that premise, with the people who actually do the encoding explaining their work in plain language. It is the best clinic I've found in translating place into brand, by people who rarely use the word "brand."
Local subreddits — the unfiltered job. r/FoodLosAngeles at home. Whatever the local sub is when I'm somewhere else. No PR, no SEO incentive, no influencer arrangement, no editor angling for a hot take. Just people who live there, asking and answering each other. The signal-to-noise is what you'd expect from Reddit. The signal is genuinely local in a way that almost nothing else online is anymore.
TikTok as a visual search engine — the discovery job. Not the feed. The search bar. Type “best birria Boyle Heights” or “coffee shop Savannah” and you get fifteen-second videos shot inside the actual place by people who eat there constantly. You see the line. You see the plate. You see the room. It is much harder to fake-review your way through video than through text, which is roughly why Gen Z stopped using Google for this years ago.
That's the kit. Curated, meta, unfiltered, visual. None of them tells the whole story of a place. Stacked, they get you closer than any single guide ever will.
The point isn't the specific titles because yours will look different from mine. The point is the practice. Local isn't going to show up in your feed. You have to go get it.
