So in 2005 Kingsolver and crew — her husband and two daughters Camille, 19, and Lily, 10 — upped sticks from Tucson and moved to Virginia, where Steven already owned a small farm of about 100 acres, most of it woodland and steep hills.

They drew up a plan for a year living as "locavores" — eating food that they had either grown themselves or had bought from the surrounding area.

You've heard of herbivores and carnivores. Now meet locavores.

Locavores are dedicated to eating food grown near home. Some set a limit of 100 miles, some a modest 50. This eating program makes it all but impossible to drink coffee or eat chocolate chip cookies. Often, bread is taboo because the wheat is grown far away.

The idea is to save on the fossil fuel that is used to transport out-of-season foods for thousands of miles, to raise some food yourself and to get in touch with a community of local farmers.

In California, in British Columbia, in Minnesota and Oklahoma and numerous other places, consumers are daring to eat cangerously and confine themselves (gasp!) to ONLY eating locally grown food.

In California, a group of "concerned culinary adventurers" called Locavores committed to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 radius of San Francisco for one month, August, 2005.