The 100-Mile Meal

Smith, who has made farming a second career since 2000, runs Springfield Farm, a 67-acre family property in Baltimore County. Besides taste, Smith says, there's the obvious freshness factor.

"When you come to our farm to buy a dozen eggs, they were laid that day or the day before, compared to those from a factory farm which are probably several months old," he says. In addition to the eggs (available daily) and a variety of turkey breeds (see local turkey resource list on Page 6 for details), Smith sells chickens and a variety of pasture-raised beef, pork, lamb and rabbit.

After participating in her first Eat Local Challenge (and joining the band of bloggers at http://eatlocalchallenge.com/), Irani started a garden with her new husband and began the legwork to form a local chapter of Locavores. The Frederick group started meeting in August.

Thanksgiving, given its harvest timing (remember that feast in 1621?) and one-day scope, is a prime opportunity to experiment with eating locally. Just last month, Locavores and 100-Mile Dieters joined forces with several other eat-local advocate groups to pose a "100-Mile Thanksgiving" challenge on their Web sites.

Here in the Washington area, with a long growing season and a climate more temperate than that of our northern neighbors, pulling off a local feast is fairly easy. All those classic Thanksgiving favorites -- sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, turkey, stuffing, apple or pumpkin pie, apple cider and a green vegetable -- are available right up until the holiday, from farms within 100 miles of the city.

Pound for pound, local turkeys undoubtedly cost more than their mass-produced supermarket counterparts. Smith won't dispute that. But he explains why you shell out a little more for a local bird.

"Local farms typically will sell at the true cost of raising the product," he says. "When we sell a turkey for $3.50 per pound, that's what it costs us to raise it and to pay us a living wage. When you're taking care of the environment and practicing good animal husbandry, you deserve more than a minimum wage; you deserve a white-collar wage."

The dollars for a local bird keep the local economy alive. "When you eat local, you are supporting family farms and their continued existence, which is what our agricultural system was built on in the first place," Smith says.

If you're worried that such an undertaking will require a long-distance road trip, put your mind to rest. The farms can come to you. In addition to several farm markets that are open through Thanksgiving (four of them -- Takoma Park, Dupont, Arlington Courthouse and Falls Church -- are open year-round), the region boasts several food co-ops and small local grocery chains. For turkeys alone, we uncovered eight farms within 100 miles taking Thanksgiving orders through this week.

In addition to Thanksgiving staples, cooks can find local milk and butter for the mashed potatoes, eggs for dessert, lard for the pie dough, sausage for the stuffing, herbs to season the bird, and even chestnuts, if they get lucky.

Irani cooked her first local turkey last year after buying it from the Frederick market, and she proclaims it "the greatest turkey I have ever had."

"The flavor was juicy, it wasn't dry, and it was my first time cooking one!" she exclaimed. But more than anything, she was proud to have prepared a meal so in keeping with the spirit of the holiday.

"In our modern culture, Thanksgiving is the last vestige of feast as celebration," she says. "It's an offering to people you care about. It's really a beautiful thing."

Kim O'Donnel's food blog, A Mighty Appetite, is updated daily onhttp://www.washingtonpost.com.