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I harbored some doubts that our family of four could actually consume (or give away as gifts) this dollar-value of food in a year. But that is only $1.72 per person, per meal; that we’d spent that much and more was confirmed by the grocery receipts I’d saved from the year before we began eating locally. As I sat at my desk leafing through those old receipts, they carried me down an odd paper trail through a time when we’d routinely bought things like BAGGED GALA APP ORG, NTP PANDA PFF, and ORNG VALNC 4#bg (I have no idea, but it set me back $1.99), with little thought for the places where these things had grown, if in fact they had grown at all.

We were still going to the supermarket, but the receipts looked different these days. In the first six months of our local year we’d spent a total of $83.70 on organic flour (about twenty-five pounds a month) for our daily bread and weekly pizza dough, and approximately the same amount on olive oil. We’d spent about $5 a week on fair-trade coffee, and had also purchased a small but steady supply of nonlocal odds and ends like capers, yeast, cashews, raisins, lasagna noodles, and certain things I considered first aid: energy bars to carry in the purse against blood sugar emergencies; boxes of mac-and-cheese. Both my kids have had beloved friends who would eat nothing, literally, except macaroni and cheese out of a certain kind of box. I didn’t want anybody to perish on my watch.

Still, our grocery-store bill for the year was a small fraction of what it had been the year before, and most of it went for regionally produced goods we had sleuthed out in our supermarket: cider vinegar, milk, butter, cheese, and wines, all grown and processed in Virginia. About $100 a month went to our friends at the farmers’ market for the meats and vegetables we purchased there. The market would now be closed for the rest of our record-keeping year, so that figure was deceptively high, including all the stocking up we’d done in the fall. In cash, our year of local was costing us well under 50¢ per meal. Add the $1.72-per-meal credit for the vegetables we grew, and it’s still a bargain. We were saving tons of money by eating, in every sense, at home.

Our goal had not really been to economize, only to exercise some control over which economy we would support. We were succeeding on both counts. If we’d had to purchase all our vegetables as most households do, instead of pulling them out of our back forty, it would still be a huge money-saver to shop in our new fashion, starting always with the farmers’ market and organizing meals from there. I know some people will never believe that. It’s too easy to see the price of a locally grown tomato or melon and note that it’s higher (usually) than the conventionally grown, imported one at the grocery. It’s harder to see, or perhaps to admit, that all those NTP PANDA PFFs do add up. The big savings come from a habit of organizing meals that don’t include pricey processed additions.

In some objective and measurable ways, we could see that our hard work had been worth the trouble. But the truth is we did it for other reasons, largely because it wasn’t our day job. Steven and I certainly could have earned more money by putting our farming hours into teaching more classes or meeting extra deadlines, using skills that our culture rewards and respects much more than food production and processing. Camille could have done the same via more yoga classes and hours at her other jobs. Lily was the only one of us, probably, who was maximizing her earning potential through farm labor.

But spending every waking hour on one job is drudgery, however you slice it. After an eight-hour day at my chosen profession, enough is enough. I’m ready to spend the next two or three somewhere else, preferably outdoors, moving my untethered limbs to a worldly beat. Sign me up on the list of those who won’t maximize their earnings through a life of professionally focused ninety-hour weeks. Plenty of people do, I know,