Being raw in New Jersey / New York?

[Hanalei]

This is kind of a random question, but how easy is it to be raw and organic in New Jersey / New York City area compared to other states? Here in west Michigan, it's fairly challenging, as we can't grow our own food in the winter (which, here, is like 5 months of being too cold to grow stuff), and the stores near us don't have a whole lot of organic options. It's getting better, but still challenging. Also, there's a lot of corn and soy fields around us (like a LOT) and I wonder how much of it is GMO (genetically modified). A local school district just got a $10,000 grant from Monsanto, so if they're not already growing lots of crap around here, I'm sure they've got something planned. How much of that is there in the Jersey/ New York area, too? I saw a flyer from last year that listed the organic farms and organic restaurants in New Jersey, and there was quite a lot, especially for such a small state! I want to move, and am just curiously checking out other areas to see how easy it'd be for me to live in different cities.

(And by the way, which area of Jersey is the best for organic stuff? It sounded like southern NJ had the most farms, but I don't really know anything about that area.)

[CaraS]

There's tons of farmer's markets in NJ, and depending on where you live, there's lots of health food stores. I just visited NJ and went to an awesome juice bar in New Brunswick called Namaste Cafe. They do raw food meetups there so there must be people doing it successfully there.

[Hanalei]

On the one page I saw, it seemed like there were quite a few organic restaurants and such, but it wasn't about raw, so it didn't help me there. It also sounds like its a little warmer there than in Michigan, so can they grow stuff longer there?

There's literally like 4 restaurants in the entire west michigan area (that I know of anyway) that focus on anything organic, and 3 of those are only sometimes organic. Their soy is not organic half the time! And around here - I don't know if this is the same as anywhere else - but if you ask someone if their food is organic or raw, probably 90% of the people here will either look at you like you're speaking Greek or they'll have to go ask someone. And it usually isn't. So most things are probably goign to be an improvement.

[therawmichelle]

This http://rawfoodhealthwatch.com/v2/raw-in-your-area/ might be helpful!

[Hanalei]

That would be super helpful if I could figure out how to change the location to New Jersey instead of Michigan... But that's a great page! (And, what a shocker - basically nothing for west michigan.)

[January Noir]

I live in NJ and live near New Brunswick. Never heard of Namaste Cafe. I'm going to have to check that out (hopefully it's still open as this post was made last year).