I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Those of us who live in the San Francisco Bay Area tend to be a bit Bay Area-centric. We think we live in the best place in the country, if not the world. This especially applies to the foodies among us; my husband and I often remark over a simple dinner made with the freshest organic produce at how lucky we are to have access to such delicious, high quality food, all year-round.

And, of course, when it comes to food, I took it for granted that we are the headquarters of the new food movement: Alice Waters and Michael Pollan both live here, after all, and didn’t Hazon move its food conference to the Bay Area because it is the epicenter of all that is happening in food?

I thought so, until two weeks ago. That’s when my husband and I set out on a road trip vacation, through the Pacific Northwest. I’ll admit that as an almost-native Californian (I moved to the Golden State at age one-and-a-half) I had never visited my northern neighbors until recently.

Two years ago, I visited Oregon for the first time, and that short visit left me wanting to come back. So this time, on our road trip, we got to see much more: Ashland, Crater Lake, Bend, Sisters, Eugene, two natural hot springs, and ending up in Portland on what was perhaps the hottest day of the summer.

Ashland is pretty close to the California border, and being about a six hour drive with no stops, it made the perfect starting and ending place for our road trip. My husband being a bit of a beer geek (and a wine geek and a food geek not to mention a computer geek) always loves to try the local brewery, so we stopped in for a drink at the Standing Stone Brewing Company before dinner.

Both this one and the Deschutes Brewery in Bend wrote that the burgers served at their breweries came from cows that were grass fed until the end, when they were fed leftover grain from the brewing process, allowing the grain to be used in yet another way.

I also came across the signs that are pictured, prominently displayed near the restrooms (pretty much guaranteeing that anyone will see them). I especially loved the statistic telling us what percentage of employees biked, walked or carpooled to work — 75 percent!

At dinner later that night, it took quite some time to get through the menu, mainly because the names of so many farms were listed as to where the food was sourced.

At a lunch spot in Eugene, we stumbled into the first place we found off the freeway. It had a sign in the window that all of its food came from local organic farms and its meats were humanely raised. On Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, we dined on local lamb that was raised right on the island, and tasted some of the best cheeses I’ve ever had in its farmer’s market. By the time we made it up to Vancouver, we saw menus with the approval symbol from the Vancouver Aquarium next to fish offerings, to show that they only served fish that was not overfished.

While we had some fantastic food on this trip and saw some beautiful places, I came away realizing that there are plenty of other places nearby that also qualify to be the epicenter of the food movement. Oregon and British Columbia don’t get the same press we do, but they’ve been farming and eating sustainably for years, without all the hype that we have.

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