Beginning in March 2005, with little preparation the urban couple began only purchasing foods with ingredients they knew were all from within 100 miles.

In 2009, Food Network Canada aired The 100 Mile Challenge, a television series co-created by MacKinnon and Smith and based on the book.

B. MacKinnon's idea of local eating began while visiting their cabin in northern British Columbia in August 2004.

Their dinner of Dolly Varden trout, wild mushrooms, dandelion leaves, apples, sour cherries, and rose hips, along with potatoes and garlic from the garden, so impressed the couple that once back home, in their Kitsilano apartment in Vancouver, they pursued the idea of eating only local food.

In the second chapter, Smith describes her and MacKinnon as an unwed urban couple in their early thirties with no children and living in a rented apartment.

The couple spend August at their cabin in northwestern British Columbia, where they fish the Skeena River, pick wild berries, and eat whatever grows in their garden.

To prepare for winter they preserved corn and tomatoes, made jam from berries, collected herbs from their community garden, and bought many potatoes.

They finally find a source of flour when they discover a farmer on Vancouver Island who grows his own fruits, vegetables, meats, and wheat.

In January they find a restaurant that specializes in local cuisine and, previously vegetarians, they cook and eat beef for the first time in years.

[3][7] The authors purposely avoided writing a self-help book in favour of the memoir style, saying, "We wanted to show readers that process, and how it affected us and let them see it through our eyes.

[5] Smith's chapters have been said to demonstrate more honesty and vulnerability, while MacKinnon's were more "show pieces, little tours de force".

[7] The final chapter was authored together by Smith and MacKinnon writing as a disembodied third-person narrator to summarize and conclude the book.

[13][14] The book reviewer for The Globe and Mail admitted he grew impatient with the grand and repetitive statements about the changing global food system and the authors' hyperbole regarding their modest culinary discoveries.

[15] While the concept of only eating locally grown food is not new, the book coincided with the emerging popularity of the locavore movement and farmer's markets.

[18][19][20] During World Food Day in 2006, playing off the popularity of Smith and MacKinnon's articles in The Tyee, the Vancouver City Hall held a 100-mile themed breakfast.

[24] In 2014, the American writer Vicki Robin published Blessing the Hands That Feed Us, which described her experiment to eat food sourced within a ten-mile radius of her home in Washington state.