You Can Make Your Own Rules

One nice thing about choosing to eat a local diet is that you can make your own rules (such a deal...).  Practically anything that you do to eat more local food is good for the planet, so you can decide what works for you and your family.
You can start gonzo hard-core by picking a small area and being strict.  Or you can choose to cook one completely-local meal a week.  Whatever works for you.

Choose the area:

• 100-mile radius circle (or 50, or 200; you choose)
  
• Your whole state (in my case Colorado); makes label reading easier
• If you live in a little state, put several states together
• Your bioregion, such as the watershed for your local river, or some other land feature

You can have exceptions:

• We decided to pick 5 exceptions each; my first is olive oil.  My husband's first two are Alaskan salmon and fair-trade coffee.  
  
• Or you can be hard-core and not allow any exceptions
• However, it is not fair to pick an exception, stock up to the gills on it, then trade it out for another one; you aren't really doing any good that way.
• We will use food that we have on hand (and since I'm such a packrat, that's a lot of food).  I don't feel it's ethical to throw away food that I already own.  The place to intercept the non-local food is when you are buying it.
• If you pick too broad an exception, such as "everything made with grains", you will probably find that you are eating commodity grain-based food from all over the place, to the exclusion of local fruits and vegetables.  Do yourself and the planet a favor by being specific: example: brown rice from California.

Choose how much of your eating is local:

• If we are invited to someone's house, we will gratefully eat what is put in front of us, without carping about its source.
• We allow ourselves one restaurant meal per week, without locality restrictions.  (You could choose none, or more, or only certain kinds of restaurants....)
• Other than that, we are eating local (and on-hand) food all other meals of the week.  You could choose to eat local for one meal a day, one meal a week (off to a slow start), or whatever works for you.  For us this includes snacks.
• If we are traveling away from our area, we will try to eat local food of the area we are visiting, but not make a big deal out of it.  This does not happen often.  If we are away from the house for lunch, we will be bringing our own food with us, instead of being tempted to stop at the fast-food haven or the minimart for snacks.