Sometimes couples do strange things — start dressing alike, say, or take up bowling. Alisa Smith and her partner James MacKinnon, both professional writers, decided to mini-size their diet. After realizing some of their food traveled 3,000 miles to their table, they decided they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint — so they committed to only eating food grown within 100 miles of their Vancouver apartment, for a year. To celebrate their decision, they had a glorious meal full of local, organic delicacies. When that set them back about $128, they quickly remembered that they were two young freelancers who were already pinching pennies. It's this realism that keeps Plenty, their co-authored memoir, from being a self-congratulatory romp.

Surprisingly, this project founded in ascetic determination turns into a year of discovery and flexibility. With many of the bare necessities off-limits (salt, cooking oil, even beer) or simply hard to get (wheat), the couple find themselves exploring their little corner of the world, getting to know fisherman and farmers. Along the way, they're schooled by an unlikely set of teachers, including intractable farmers, a Native American fisherman, and an old cookbook from the '40s. Their provocative reflections illustrate how quixotic it is to eat against the grain these days.

Trading off his-and-hers chapters, the two offer complementary but distinct stories. Occasionally, both MacKinnon and Smith digress to the point of losing the reader, but they usually salvage the story by bringing it back to the dinner plate. James is the cook — excitable, stubborn, and given to rapturous bursts of natural history. Alisa is equally passionate, but also practical, more of a social historian than her partner. She's candid about the impact their diet is having on their lives, as they suck it up through weevil scares, tedious bouts of canning, and the inevitable intrusions of real-world troubles. The cumulative strain comes very close to breaking them up for good, but the saving grace of Plenty is that it doesn't try to hide the wear and tear. That makes all the pluck, humor, and plain-old good eating all the more savory.

-Toby Warner