Eating local can seem daunting. How much easier is it to dash into the Food Lion on your way home from work than to plan your meals and grocery shopping around trips to farmers markets and farm share deliveries?

We wanted to see just how challenging the "locavore" lifestyle can be. So we recruited a family, already committed to buying groceries grown or raised in North Carolina, to let us chronicle their eating and shopping habits in 2008. Because our family includes small children, we'll get to see how eating local works with occasionally picky eaters, school lunches and the hectic lifestyle of two working parents and two children under age 6.

We will also detail the costs of eating local. Certainly pasture-raised chickens at the Carrboro Farmers Market are more expensive than the conventionally grown birds at the Harris Teeter. But how does buying locally grown foods affect a family's budget? Our family is willing to let us track and publish what they spend each month on groceries, and calculate the percentage spent on local foods.

And so let us introduce the Pekars.

Zach, 40, and Nancy, 38, met in Washington, D.C., in 1994 and married four years later. They live in Carrboro. Zach grew up in Chapel Hill, while Nancy is originally from Madison, Wis. They have two children, Jake, 3, and Gemma, 5.

Zach is an environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency. Nancy is a writer for Fuentek, an Apex-based customized technology management service. Those are just day jobs. In their spare time, he plays electric violin in the folk rock band Oscar Begat and she acts with the Transactors Improv Company.

The Pekars choose to eat local for several reasons. They want to support local farmers who use sustainable agriculture techniques, which means farmers who use chemicals sparingly, if at all, in an attempt to maintain balance in the ecosystem and keep from harming the environment. The Pekars also want to limit the amount of fossil fuel that is spent to bring them their food, which means choosing a North Carolina-grown potato rather than one from Idaho.

Nancy, who loves to cook, wants the best seasonal ingredients. The family shops at the Carrboro Farmers Market to support a twice-weekly event that they love about their community, what Zach calls the social gathering of granola-types.

Plus, Zach says, "I like the concept of supporting people that are doing something that they love."

And a little child led them

But they didn't start out as market regulars. Nancy admits she used to wake up on Saturday mornings after the market had closed. The impetus was the birth of their daughter. When Gemma started getting them up at 7 a.m., the farmers market became a family excursion because it was within walking distance of their house.

Now, they are Saturday market regulars. Three years ago, they started splitting a farm share with neighbors through Elysian Fields, a Cedar Grove farm that sells shares of its harvest and delivers fresh produce to its members every week during the growing season. More recently, the Pekars have started buying locally raised beef and pork, which they sock away in their extra refrigerator and deep freezer. In anticipation of our series of stories, Nancy even blanched and froze a bunch of last summer's local tomatoes so she would have sauce on hand during the lean winter months.

Nancy is aware that having a newspaper record her family's efforts to eat local may change their behaviors. "I try to be thoughtful about my approach to food," she says. "Participating in this forces me to have a higher awareness."

As the year progresses, we'll be checking in with the Pekars, writing about the challenges and bounties they face with each season. We plan to publish stories in the spring, summer, fall and winter. Likely, we will learn from their experiences, be inspired by their example and think more about our food.