From Mylife.com
The 10 Best Mid-Sized Cities for Food Lovers
It can be often tough for true food lovers to enjoy the freshest, best tasting and most healthy foods out there, especially if you live in a smaller city. It can be difficult to get fresh food out to smaller locales, and for restaurant owners, it is often more profitable to plant fast-and-easy food restaurants rather than invest in pricey establishments which may have difficulty getting great-tasting ingredients at low cost.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible – great eating can happen outside the big metros, so to see who was doing it best, we underwent a study to determine which mid-sized cities were best for food lovers to reside. We found that not only was great eating possible in mid-sized cities, it was also sometimes abundant – especially in our top ten.
Here’s How We Ranked Them
We started with a list of 100 mid-sized cities, which we determined as those ranking 101 through 200 in population based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 estimates. We then applied a ranking of 1 through 100 in each of the following categories:
- Number of top rated restaurants in the area – Fast food and those like it did not count. These restaurants, according to Yelp, had to have a rating of three-and-a-half stars or higher, with at least ten reviews.
- Number of top rated restaurants in the area that serve international cuisine – American food is great, but a true food lover enjoys sampling the many delicacies of other countries. Again, they had to have a three-and-a-half star rating or higher along with at least ten reviews according to Yelp.
- Number of farmers markets in the area – We can’t afford to eat out all the time, so we food lovers often want to cook at home using fresh ingredients. The more farmers markets there are in a certain town, the more opportunities to eat well. We defined farmers markets as any store described as such by its customers on Yelp, with the belief that even non-traditional markets would be valuable to the cooking community.
- Community Supported Agriculture Farms in the area – CSA farms allow local residents to invest in a farm’s production, giving them access to fresh, locally grown produce at reasonable prices. This gives the home cook the ability to conveniently get the best ingredients for their food. We used LocalHarvest.com to find these figures.
We decided not to use per capita numbers for this study because most of these variables could be enjoyed independent of population size – as long as they were reachable by their residents. Since each of these cities were relatively close in population size, the per capita impact did not seem like a number that would add to the value of the study.
Each city was given a score based on their rankings in each category. Scores from each category were combined and divided to find an average. The lower the average number was, the better the city ranked.
1. Pasadena, CA
Photo by David Karp
Site of the Rose Bowl and mere minutes from Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, Pasadena ranked third or better in three of the categories, despite ranking 180th in population. The city boasts a great diversity of highly-ranked restaurants, both international and domestic, and also had the largest number of farmers markets in our study. One highlight is the weekly Old Pasadena Farmers Market, pictured above, which features more than 40 food vendors from around the area.
Here's the whole story: http://www.mylife.com/blog/the-10-best-mid-sized-cities-for-food-lovers/