Like with many new movements, the 100-mile diet was an idea born of necessity.

Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon were stranded in their remote cabin in northern British Columbia, miles from the nearest grocery store when they realized they had no food to feed their guests.

Rather than throw their hands up in despair, they turned to the bounty of their surrounding landscape.

"We caught some fish, picked some mushrooms in the forest, dug up potatoes we had planted in spring," Smith told CTV.ca of their memorable meal.

"We felt part of the story of that meal, and wanted to recreate that feeling, if we could, at our home in Vancouver."

Back in the city, they were shocked to find that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels roughly the distance between Toronto and Whitehorse before it reaches the plate.

"For the average American meal (and we assumed the average Canadian meal is similar), World Watch reports that the ingredients typically travel between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres, a 25 per cent increase from 1980," the couple wrote in a closely watched online column that attracted responses from as far away as Norway, France and Australia.

"This average meal uses up to 17 times more petroleum products and increases carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount, compared to an entirely local meal."

And so their local eating experiment was born on the first day of spring in 2005.

Determined to take action that was environmentally responsible and promoted sustainability, they decided to eat only food grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their walk-up apartment in Vancouver.

'Thin pickings'

But their culinary journey wasn't an easy one to embark upon.

In some ways, they were ignorant, they admit in their book "The 100-Mile Diet" (Random House).

"Like a lot of urban dwellers, we thought that meant all the vegetables would jump out of the ground within a week," MacKinnon said.

"And of course, that's not the case. It was a long cold wet spring in and around Vancouver, so it was definitely thin pickings."

When they first walked into a grocery store, it was as if more than 95 per cent of what was previously on the shelves had simply vanished, he said.

The list of banned foods seemed a mile long at first -- no tofu, no rice, no olive oil, no sugar.

Along the way, though, they discovered new tastes that replaced comfortable staples.

Fruits and vegetables they had never heard of before became part of their daily menu, foods such as gooseberries; the leafy vegetable known as purslane; seafood such as sidestriped shrimp; and an obscure French heritage carrot that was a dark red colour.

Realizing that wheat was nowhere to be found was a discovery that was harder to swallow.

"It turns out Vancouver isn't a hot spot for wheat growing, and it took us about seven months to find one maverick farmer who was growing grain."

They even eased up on their vegetarian lifestyle.

"All of a sudden we're eating salmon and cheese and we even got into local organic beef as well," MacKinnon told CTV's Canada AM.

Their biggest challenge was finding time to track down the food, and learning how to prepare their meals from scratch, he said.

"Eating locally was like having the mega-market vanish, and we had to learn all these new skills -- like canning, pickling, baking -- to get ourselves in food," he told CTV.ca.

Nourishing a movement

What began as a struggle slowly became a pleasure that transcended all expectations and nourished a local movement.

"We made a commitment to try to do this for a year, but as it went on, it became more and more of a pleasure as we really reconnected with the people and the places that produce our food," MacKinnon said.

"Everything we were eating was fresh -- at the peak of its food value and nutrition and flavour. It was really an amazing year of eating."

Still, Smith and MacKinnon admit to cheating.

"We had something of a social-life clause built in," MacKinnon conceded.

"We definitely didn't want to abuse it, but we decided that we didn't want to turn this into something that was ridiculously hard core. ... We didn't want to become hermits and not have a social life for a year either," he said.

But as time went by, they found their friends trying to accommodate their new lifestyle.

"We sank deeper and deeper into it until in the final months we were 100 per cent local foodies," MacKinnon said.

Nearly 100 per cent, that is. They did cheat with one item - salt.

"It's strange because you are in Vancouver and you can smell it in the air and sea it in the ocean but we just couldn't find a supplier," MacKinnon said. "Our very last act of the diet was to go out and finally try to make some salt."

While they are no longer sticking to the 100-mile diet, their current lifestyle still bears the imprint of their experiment.

"We go to farmers' market every week ... the food always tastes better than what you'll find on supermarket shelf, because that's been picked three weeks before and kept in storage and possibly ripened artificially," Smith said.

It's only a matter of time before this local movement spreads its wings beyond Vancouver's borders, she said.

"It's exciting to see the explosion in the number of farmers' markets in communities that never had them before," she said.

But the local food movement won't really take off until it becomes more accessible, she said.

"I think local food has to become more accessible and easier to find for people to find than it was for us, not everyone can set aside a year and delve into an idea like this, and I think that is starting to happen because there is a core of people who are really starting to demand local food," she said.

"Suppliers and farmers are going to start reacting to the demand," she predicted.