These local diet memoirs and urban farming handbooks reveal the best about eating locally.

Plenty: Eating Locally On the 100-Mile Diet
By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
Plenty tells the remarkable adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment--and learn the simple joys of reconnecting with community and home ground in the process.

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods
By Gary Paul Nabhan
To rediscover what it might mean to "think globally, eat locally," Nabhan spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or caught within 200 miles of his home--with surprising results. In Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan draws these experiences together in a book that is a culmination of his life's work.

Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America's Farmers' Markets
By Deborah Madison
Madison takes readers along as she visits farmers' markets across the country, and shares over 350 recipes and menus using the superlative ingredients she finds there.

Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living
By Doug Fine
NPR's Rural Guy vows to give up modern conveniences to move to a ranch in New Mexico where he'll grow all his own food--never mind that he has no practical experience or mechanical skills. This is both a hilarious account and an inspiring call to action for anyone who wants to live greener.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it.

Made From Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life
By Jenna Woginrich
As a young, single woman with a desk job and a city apartment, Woginrich set out to build a more self-sufficient lifestyle by learning homesteading skills. This is the story of her joyful, dramatic, and sometimes sorrowful journey toward self-reliance.

The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food: Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional: From the Lost WPA Files
Edited and illustrated by Mark Kurlansky
Bestselling author Mark Kurlansky paints a detailed picture of Depression Era Americans through the food that they ate and the local traditions and customs they observed when planning and preparing meals.

Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen
By Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry
Combining a straight-to-the-point expos about organic foods (organic doesn't mean fresh, natural, or independently produced) and the how-to's of creating an affordable, easy-to-use organic kitchen, Grub brings organics home to urban dwellers.

The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
By Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

Barnyard in Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide to Raising Chickens, Ducks, Geese, Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, and Cows
Edited by Gail Damerow
In this beginner's guide, the editor of Rural Heritage magazine collects expert advice on raising chickens, goats, sheep, cows, and other barnyard animals for fun, recreation, and profit.

This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader 
By Joan Dye Gussow
A woman with a decidedly green thumb, Gussow's book describes her quest to grow an organic garden that will totally provide for her family, thus eliminating store bought, foreign produced foods from their life.

Sharing the Harvest: A Guide to Community Supported Agriculture
By Elizabeth Henderson with Robyn Van En
To an increasing number of American families the CSA (community supported agriculture) is the answer to the globalization of our food supply. The premise is simple: create a partnership between local farmers and nearby consumers, who become members or subscribers in support of the farm.

Book descriptions provided by BookLetters.