Eco-Friendly Eating On-the-Go

For those having trouble eating green on the go, guests can take their pick from the many Whole Foods Market and Chipotle Mexican Grill locations around the city for earth-friendly eating any day of the week.

With its recent commitment to partner with local farmers, Chipotle Mexican Grill is the first and only national restaurant company committed to buying local on a significant scale. Chipotle purchases 25 percent of at least one of its produce items for each of its 730-plus restaurants from small and mid-sized local farms.

The produce, which includes romaine lettuce, green bell and jalapeno peppers, and red onions, arrive from local farms when seasonally available.

This latest initiative is part of Chipotle's Food With Integrity philosophy,a way of doing business that is better for consumers, farmers, and the environment. The company's other accomplishments in this arena include serving more naturally raised meat (all pork and chicken and nearly 60% of beef) than any other restaurant company in the world; serving 30% organically grown blackand pinto beans; and only using cheese and sour cream made with milk from cows that are NOT treated with the synthetic hormone rBGH (recombinantbovine growth hormone).

All locations feature a focused menu of burritos,tacos, burrito bowls (a burrito without the tortilla) and salads made from fresh, high-quality raw ingredients that are good to go.

Chipotle has 12Atlanta-area locations; visit www.chipotle.com for more information.

Whole Foods Market (www.wholefoodsmarket.com) the leading natural and organic foods supermarket, offers a variety of to-go meal options, so guests can indulge in environmentally friendly fare on the run.

These options are housed within a large prepared foods section that includes an extensive salad bar, deli, sushi or seafood bar and multiple ethnic food selections among many other hot and cold plates in which all of the ingredients are natural or organic and as many as possible are locally grown.

And best of all, the supermarket chain's new compostable, all-natural bulrush to-go containers keep shoppers environmentally conscious on the fly. Unlike traditional paper and plastic packaging, these containers are made from annually renewable bulrush, which is a tall marshplant that grows abundantly in the wild and is more commonly known as cattail. Not only are these containers highly functional for temporary food storage and may be used in a microwave, they degrade in a compost pile in approximately 90 days!

Whole Foods Market has also banned plastic grocery bags and strongly encourages reusable grocery bags by providing affordable bags and by paying at least a nickel-per-bag refund to customers.