'Locavore' this year's word of the year

People who buy local food to find better nutritional value and help the farmer have become the 2007 Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.
"Locavore" was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local resident should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100- mile radius.
The past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.
"The word 'locavore' shows how food-lovers can enjoy what they eat while still appreciating the impact they have on the environment," said Ben Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. "It's significant in that it brings together eating and ecology in a new way."
The 'locavore' movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers' markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

Runners-up for the 2007 Word of the Year include:
- Aging in place: the process of growing older while living in one's own residence, instead of having to move to a new home or community.
- Bacn: email notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted "spam" (coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in Aug. 2007 and popularized in the blogging community).
- Cloudware: online applications, such as webmail, powered by massive data storage facilities, also called "cloud servers".
- Colony collapse disorder: a still-unexplained phenomenon resulting in the widespread disappearance of honeybees from beehives, first observed in late 2006.
- Cougar: an older woman who romantically pursues younger men
- MRAP vehicle: Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, designed to protect troops from improvised explosive devices (IEDs)

Credit: http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/