Ever think about the cost in energy and to the environment involved in shipping all the food and drink we consume over long distances, sometimes thousands of miles? It's considerable. That's one of the reasons I was intrigued by an e-mail from an old friend, Ellie Bluestein, advising of something called the "100-mile Diet."

It was cooked up by a pair of Canadians, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, of Vancouver. They have a wonderful Web site, smart and charming and not at all preachy.

The idea is to find all the food we eat within a 100-mile radius of home. In the case of Fresno, that's a circle that stretches nearly to the coast, north almost to Stockton, and south almost to Bakersfield.

Smith and MacKinnon acknowledge difficulties: "We walked into the diet cold turkey for a full year, and it was hard. ... It took us seven months to find a rogue local farmer who actually grows wheat. Meanwhile, we ate an unbelievable number of potatoes." But they also came quickly to realize that they were eating fresher, more nutritious food, preparing most of it at home and avoiding all the additives and extra sugar, fat and salt that come with most processed foods.

Living in this region ought to make such a diet much easier than it might be elsewhere. Smith and MacKinnon may be on to something.