Answers to your questions about the 100-mile diet and eating locally grown food.

1.	Why eat locally?

See our 13 Lucky Reasons

2.	Why 100 miles?

There's no universal definition for "local eating," but many people find a 100-mile radius is a useful starting point. It's simple. It's small enough to feel close to home. It's big enough to offer a variety of foods. Best of all, you can map your own 100-mile region by punching in your zip code at 100milediet.org/map.

3.	How difficult is the 100-mile diet?

We walked into the diet cold turkey for a full year, and it was hard. It took us seven months to find one maverick local farmer who grows West Coast wheat! Meanwhile, we ate potatoes: mashed, boiled, roasted, fried, baked, etc. Doing it the hard way taught us a lot about the food system, but it isn't for everybody. A more realistic approach is to plan a single, totally 100-mile meal with friends or family, and see where you want to go from there.

4.	What about coffee?

For real coffee lovers, there is no local substitute to the morning java jolt. But don't let your need for a caffeine fix stop you from trying to eat more local food! Local eating isn't something you have to do all the way or no way. Do it as much as your schedule and your resources allow. (Oh, and think about choosing organic, fairtrade coffee beans.)

5.	Did you feel malnourished?

For one year we ate only the freshest food that had traveled the shortest possible distances and was eaten or preserved at its seasonal peak. We didn't eat any sugar (we used honey) or processed fats. Most of our food was organic, and none of it came out of a box. Does that answer the question?

6.	Were your meals repetitive and boring?

At first, yes. As we found more and more local food sources, though, our meals became more interesting than ever before. Now our cupboards are stocked with foods we'd never tried before: bladderwrack seaweed, spot prawns, gooseberry wine, miner's lettuce, celery root and more. Then there are the forgotten varieties of familiar foods. Ever had a French Breakfast radish? Calypso beans? A Gloria Mundi apple? North America's small farms are essential to our food diversity-according to the United Nations, we've lost some 90 percent of the world's crop varieties since 1900.

7.	Can this be done in New York City/Alaska/the desert?

We recently ate a 100-mile meal in New York within 24 hours of arriving at JFK airport. We've heard from 100-milers in every part of North America, from Arizona to the Yukon. Remember: we human beings lived mainly off our local landscapes for most of our history on Earth-and much of the world still eats this way. With a little planning, local eating is never impossible. And yes, that's a direct challenge to scientists in Antarctica and astronauts in the International Space Station.

8.	Was it expensive?

Again, only in the beginning. Most of us pay a big premium for out-of-season foods like cherries in winter or prepared foods like spaghetti sauce, usually with a long list of ingredients we might prefer not to have in our bodies. Eating locally, we bought fresh ingredients in season and direct from the farmer—and we were often buying bulk. We preserved enough food for the winter that we rarely had to buy groceries. Our bet? Most people eating a typical diet could save money by eating locally.

9.	Did it take a lot of time?

We won't lie—it takes time to find local food sources, to make food from scratch, to do canning for winter, and so on. But it also raises interesting questions about how we're spending our time. What if we spent more time on self-sufficiency and less time at the office?

10.	What did you miss the most?

Every region has foods that are hard—or impossible—to find. We went without wheat for seven months. We missed pasta. We missed bread. We missed pancakes. Then we found our wheat farmer, and we pigged out.

11.	Will I lose weight?

The world of weight-loss diets is a weird and not-so-wonderful place. Let's put it this way: a local diet is likely to involve lots of fresh produce and homemade meals, and not a lot of junk food, processed fats, additives, or sugar.

12.	Which is better, local or organic?

Why choose? Most of what we eat is local and organic. In many ways, the local food movement is revisiting the original goals of the organics movement: good food produced at a human scale, eaten in season and close to home.

13.	Are you still on the 100-mile diet?

Yes-more or less. We lived a year on the 100-mile diet as an experiment. Now we're committed to eating locally, but certain long-distance favorites have made it back into the larder. Like olives. And chocolate. And beer.

J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith are the authors of the new book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Year of Local Eating (Harmony Books).