How to support your community, your health, and your future.

You've probably already heard that the state of our country's food system is pretty ugly.

But just in case you missed it: the stuff at most grocery stores is actively poisoning you and the planet, and doing untold harm to the millions of workers and animals involved on the production side. Meanwhile, it's keeping a very small -- but privileged -- set of CEOs rich from government subsidies and distorted cost structures.

That's the bad news, anyway.

The good news is there's a genuine, viable alternative to this system -- and it's especially active in New England. Here in the Boston area it's very easy to unplug from the corporate industrial food complex and plug in to the local foods movement. And we like to point to ourselves as the co-founders of Boston Localvores as an example of how it can be done.

We're not patting ourselves on the back here. Just saying, if a couple of lesbians living in Cambridge who work full time and don't have trust funds can pull this off, so can you.

For the last two years, we have gotten as much of our food as possible from local sources. We shop at farmers' markets and a few independent shops around the city for a little bit of everything -- produce, meat, dairy, bread, and eggs -- from regional growers or producers. Through the summer, fall, and deep winter months we have a CSA (community supported agriculture) share, which means we get a weekly box of vegetables from a farm in the western part of the state. We buy our meat directly from farmers. For most of the year, we can identify the origins of about 85 percent of what we eat.

It's true, we have to cook just about every day. However, learning how to cook is like learning how to make out. It will serve you well for the rest of your life.

For us, it goes a bit farther than cooking. During the summer and fall, we have to preserve a lot, too. We've also recently started milling our own flour -- from whole grains grown in Massachusetts. Eventually, these tasks take up time we could spend watching reality TV, but every time we hear a story about someone dying because they ate a cheeseburger or some bagged spinach tainted with E. coli, it all seems worth it. Plus, the simple fact is, what we eat is more delicious than anything sold in a grocery store. It's fresher and it's the real deal, and you will know it when you try it.

Oh yeah, but it costs more. Or, people like to say it does and use that as a reason to not eat locally. The truth is, we no longer have any sense how much it costs to just buy a week's worth of groceries from the grocery store, but we spend about $50-$75 a week for two people plus whatever other hungry souls wander through our kitchen that week. By putting cooking and eating at the center of our world, we put gathering with friends there, too.

One of those friends likes to joke about how it's been way more difficult "coming out" as a conscientious, ethical, local eater than it was coming out coming out. The first time, to his surprise and relief, his loving family applauded him.

But now when he goes home, he wrestles with how to handle a Costco steak served to him by those same loving people. They can't understand why anyone would choose to spend more, sometimes considerably more, for something they could have for cheap. Gay? Sure. But $10.99/lb for grass-fed beef? That's crazy!

Now, we're no mathematic geniuses, but we can surmise that when meat costs 99 cents per pound, somebody is not making what they should (that would be the workers) and practice isn't what it should be (that would be the many cubic tons of feces dumped illegally in our rivers). This is just the very tippity tip of the iceberg.

Here is the crux of the whole thing: What you pay for when you take care, source your food responsibly, and spend a little more makes a whole world a difference to you, your family, and friends who trust you to feed them, your farming community, and your whole community.

Oh, and every dollar you spend that way puts another nail in the coffin of big, greedy, polluting, rich, straight white dude monopoly. That's a big bonus (or maybe that's just us.)

For more information or to join Boston Localvores, visit www.bostonlocalvores.org.