Food is inspiring, it’s that simple. Eating is the most important human activity, and a consumer choice we make every day. Suddenly, people started noticing our country was having a three-ring food crisis: We have unprecedented health and obesity problems, due to poor diets. We’re putting almost as much fossil fuels into our refrigerators as our cars. And our farmers and rural communities are struggling to survive. All these problems have one cause: we’re buying so much of our food from far away. We rarely look at our plates and ask: “Where has this stuff been?”
At my house, we’d asked that question for years. Like many families, we were uncomfortable with the environmental costs of agribusiness and the health costs of junk food. Many problems can be solved by one solution, getting food from closer to home. We’d discovered it’s not so very hard to be a more conscious consumer of food. Not everybody can walk away from the industrial food pipeline altogether, but all of us can take a few steps, and the benefits are immediate.
I’d thought about writing a book on this subject for years, but I have absolutely no interest in telling other people what to do. It dawned on me, though, that narratives inspire people in a different way, explaining possibilities. We talked a lot, as a family, about sharing our own experience of eating more locally. We decided to frame it as a one-year narrative, in which we would try to make our best efforts. Giving the project some structure made it more fun for us, and gave the book its shape.