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"You are what you eat."

We've all heard this familiar expression many times, but how often do we think about what it means? Nick Rose does often.

Rose is a graduate student at Virginia Tech working on a doctorate in community nutrition. He saw a disturbing trend in American eating and formulated a study to learn more about it. Funded by a grant from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, he enlisted 20 families to eat "the hundred mile diet."

"We have to eat," Rose told me. "While you can find or buy some wild food, like berries, most of what we eat has to be produced in some way. Nowadays our food system has gotten so big, it's really hard to trace back where food has come from or what it took to get that food from where it was either grown or raised and delivered to your dinner table."

Recent books, such as Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," have heightened awareness of the perils of industrial food production.

"There is a growing resistance to the conventional food system. There are a lot of people waking up to [the pitfalls]," Rose said.

The people in his study group grew their own food, shopped at farmers markets and bought directly from farmers. Rose gave them a resource guide, and they traded information among themselves.

"The reasons for joining the study were many," he said, "but most people quoted supporting the local economy, not giving their money to corporations, avoiding the environmental implications of shipping food around the world, and connecting with the community, looking in the eye the person who puts the food on your table."

Rose never asked them to do this in a healthy way. He just wanted them to find enough to eat.

"People felt really good about themselves. They really felt empowered."

Rose participated, too. "I personally felt really positive about the fact that my money didn't leave the area," he said.

It occurred to me that you are not only what you eat, you are also where you eat. Our ancestors ate by necessity what their area offered. Today we've divorced ourselves from that geographic limitation.

But if our future brings increasing costs and scarcities of energy, a relocalization seems inevitable.

Not only is the current system negatively impacting us, it is harming the planet as well. The food service industry is notoriously wasteful, with 25 percent of its food going into the trash can, as it buys to meet expected demand. Furthermore, appearance is important to the industry, so it will "discard a potato that has a blemish, because they can't serve it," said Rose. "Discarding food, packaging food, and shipping food, they're all wasteful."

People at grocery stores often assume the store is buying locally, but that's not always the case. The clementines I bought recently were grown in Spain, packaged in a small wooden crate, then evidently shipped by cargo jet to arrive on the supermarket shelf quickly enough to be fresh. The fuel energy expended in shipping it here overwhelms the food energy we receive from eating it. It's almost as if we eat petroleum. It's amazing that statistically, the average American meal travels on average 1,200 miles from where it is produced to your plate.

"I really think there are many reasons we should work to regionalize our food supply," Rose said. "When you buy locally, 100 percent of your money stays here. When you buy from the grocery store, only about 20 percent goes to the person who produces the food. The farmers I know really know what they're doing; they respect the land, and they don't push the land to the point where there are environmental problems."

Local food production, both locally and nationally, is deeply ingrained in our DNA. We have nearly killed it by having abundant cheap energy. If we can relocalize food production, it will build tighter communities, improve nutrition and reduce energy consumption. Everyone benefits.

Michael Abraham grew up in Christiansburg and lives in Blacksburg. He keeps doing the things his mother warned him against.