Just finished The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J. B. MacKinnon. I must admit I was a tad weary that this book would be overly preachy and I would be left feeling less than stellar about my destruction of the environment (by participating in the overwhelming global food system). The book proved instead to be honest, captivating, and the genuine story of a couple who decided to eat locally for a whole year on a whim, and ending up learning one of the most important lessons we all seem to be forgetting: food is about more than just sustenance. It is about our relationships to people and to our land. It is an adventure. 

I highly recommend this book.

An excerpt:

It's no secret that we, as a society, have been losing the traceability not only of our food, but of every aspect of our lies. On any given day, chances are high I will have no idea what phase the moon is in. I cannot reliably list my brothers' birthdates, and I regularly use products that work according to principles that I cannot explain. I suspect I will go through life without meeting an of the people who make my shoes, or even seeing the factories where those shoemakers work. Like many people, Alisa and I have lost all trace of our traceability to community.... I had expected the 100-mile experiment to be a platform to think about many things, among them a long list of bummers from climate change to the failure of whole generations to learn how to recognize edible mushrooms. What I could see around the table was now a less tangible consideration: a sense of adventure. We are at a point in world history where bad news about the state of the Earth is just as jaded and timeworn as the idea that there is nowhere left to go, nothing new to explore. Put those two statements side by side however, and something hidden is revealed. Of course there are new things to do, and no shortage of them. We need to find new was to live into the future. We can start any time.