Here we are, moving along in the age of social networking.

These days, you’re nobody until somebody tags you as a “friend,” labels you in an embarrassing photograph or leaves cryptic in-jokes on your homepage for others to decipher. Your best friend from the fifth grade? Find her! Your junior prom date? See if he ever came out of the closet! Stalk your crush or make plans for Friday night.

Our profiles display our personalities and connect us to like-minded people. There is Facebook for the preppy, MySpace for the underage and LinkedIn for the professional set.

And for us gourmets and locavores? FarmFoody.org connects us.

Although if you ask Tom Davenport, the co-creator of the FarmFoody network, he sees it more as fostering a love affairs than connecting friends.

“It’s very much like Match.com, except instead of sex and brown hair and age, we match people over corn and peaches and beef.”

Davenport is a farmer these days, operating Hollin Farms in Delaplane, Va., while Steve Knoblock, the site’s other co-creator, is a web developer with a family history connected to agriculture. The two originally collaborated on a site, folkstreams.net, that streams short films about local folklore — films that weren’t finding distributors but were able to find an audience on the Internet. Extrapolating from the success of that site, and mixing in their agricultural backgrounds, they saw a way to connect farmers directly with those who might buy their wares.

“I realized that, using the Internet, as we had created an audience for these niche films that were 15 minutes long, maybe we could create markets for these niche farmers, to, and put them directly in contact with the audience.”

Their mission is to leverage social networking in a way that could help sustainable and small farms. Davenport and Knoblock want to provide small farms with a way to bridge the economic gap they are up against with agribusiness.

Instead of amassing “friends” like you might on other social networking sites, this site lets the user amass foodies. Farms can post bulletins on what they’re growing and what’s in season, and can post recipes that put the produce to good use.

Food people can find each other, exchange recipes or let people know who sells the best strawberries or where the best apple-picking is to be had.

Instead of favorite movies or quotations featured in the less-delicious social networking sites, FarmFoody asks for your favorite foods and what you’re “foraging for” at the moment.

If you’re foraging for strawberries, then a producer trying to sell them can find you when they search. If you’re looking for local goat’s milk, a simple search will direct you to a local producer, and you can befriend them and communicate a trade directly.

In the same way that small businesses must compete with the Wal-Marts of the world by providing personalized, one-on-one service, the founders believe that family-run, small farming can beat out agribusiness by becoming “personal farmers” to their customers.

In other words, farms grow what foodies are asking for, and foodies develop a stake in the farm; their loyalty becomes an effective counterweight to the Driscoll’s of the world.

“We like to think of the social network as restoring the balance that once existed in small-town America between the farmer and the customer,” explains their mission statement.

Davenport follows up on that idea: “Our site creates a direct relationship between producer and consumer that was broken after World War II. Before World War II, 80 percent of people were farmers. Now it’s 1 perent. The Internet can give small farms a chance by creating a personal relationship and a certain amount of trust in that relationship

“I think FarmFoody draws on a certain amount of nostalgia for that relationship. It’s in our genes, to want to be connected to the earth.”

And isn’t that the essence of what it means to be a locavore? Sure, it saves gasoline when you limit your “food miles,” but is that enough to give up on asparagus in the fall or apples in the spring? Eating in season certainly tastes better, but bananas sure taste good year-round.

Don’t those of us who try to eat locally and in season crave a more personal connection to our food and nurse a fondness for the days when we knew who grew it? Don’t we feel a connection to the changing seasons and the bounty that the earth offers us?

In my real life, I work in politics, and the political world is trying to predict the long-term effects of the social networking phenomenon. Can it replace face to face communication? Is someone tagged a “friend” of a candidate actually going to vote for him or her? Will people use the new technology to become better informed and make better decisions, or will it all just devolve into a mess of emoticons and pseudo-pornography?

These questions plague FarmFoody, too (well, maybe not the pornography bit, although we gourmet types do have great appetites for all the pleasures of life). Will virtual farms befriending virtual foodies translate into real money exchanging hands for real produce? Can social networking really impact people’s consumption habits? Can a website stop the decline of the family farmer and the forward march of agribusiness?

I can’t see into the future, but I am encouraged by the idea. There is a growing number of people insisting on local and organic — people like us who wake up early on our weekends off to visit farmers’ markets and put our money directly into the hands of those who grew our salad. Another tool that facilitates connection and communication can only be a good thing.