Looking for ways to help America get the oil monkey off her back? Here’s one - join the Eat Local Challenge.

Blogger Chris Clarke ’splains:

Most of the food that most of us eat travels farther than you might think from farm to table. I’m not just talking about ripe fruit from Chile in the winter here. I myself have unwittingly bought tomatoes that were picked in California, shipped to Massachusetts for packaging, and then brought back to California for sale. Figuring a diesel semi gets around 5 miles per gallon, that’s about 1200 gallons of fuel for one truckload’s round trip. The US burns millions of gallons of fuel each year just moving food cross-country, and the notion of eating seasonal produce seems to be dying out with the local family farm. And produce picked early eanough that it can travel cross country before it ripens just tastes bad. Compare the best supermarket tomato you can find with an ordinary one from a backyard garden. The difference is astonishing. […]

So what’s got me stoked? More and more people are trying to eat food grown as close to locally as possible. Some of them have issued the Eat Local Challenge, which runs through May.

The lesson: try your hand at veggie gardening, and buy your produce from local growers whenever possible. Good for you, your wallet, and the environment.