Would you separate wheat grains from rat shit in your quest to eat local? One couple gave it a try — until they found weevils hiding in the grains.

That couple’s Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, who’ve now detailed their year-long experiment to eat only stuff grown or raised within a 100-mile radius from their Vancouver home in Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally.

Since I tried the 100-mile diet myself — albeit with an extremely loose definition of “100 miles” and without weevils — of course I had to read the book too. And not just because I got a review copy –

Each chapter, devoted to each month of the year, kicks off with a mouthwatering recipe — then speeds full force into the latest food challenge: Finding a local wheat farmer. Canning and jamming fruits and veggies. Coaxing more detailed info out of the sellers at the seafood market. Making local salt, Ghandi-style.

Weaved into these adventures are engaging history lessons and contemporary musings on the consequences of our fast food culture, the many disastrous effects industrial farming, the impact of farm subsidies — with a glimpse as to how we can each work against these shortcomings of our global food economy, a forkful at a time.

Alice and James write alternating chapters, and along with both the joys and struggles of the diet, detail the joys and struggles of their own relationship. It seems the 100-mile diet brings up all sorts of questions about proximity. How close is too close? When’s distance desirable? What, in fact, is worth the effort, worth struggling for?

Of course, would-be 100-mile dieters also have to resist getting bogged down by over-detailed questions — “Would we eat vegetables grown in manure from local cows that ate nonlocal feed? Would we have to ask even the vegetable farmers where their fertilizer came from?”

Plenty’s eye-opening and moving — and mouthwatering. You might pick it up to read the sumptuous descriptions of unexpected local culinary concoctions — then get inspired to hit the farmers’ market to create your own, one-of-a-kind local dish.