I feel like a junkie.

I keep trying to rationalize. It’s just one can, I think to myself. Other people do it. Just one can, and then I’ll go back to being good, I promise.

But it’s from Thailand, the angel on my shoulder argues as I read the back of the label.

How about this one? I suggest timidly to the angel, picking up another can of pineapple chunks. No dice: Indonesia.

This one? The Philippines.

But I’m making pizza, I tell the angel helplessly. Homemade! With local wheat and cheese and mushrooms and sausage! Surely one can of pineapple chunks won’t offset all that global goodwill?

The angel frowns. I flick her off my shoulder and buy the can anyway.

Hi, my name is Jennifer and I’m addicted to cheap food from many, many miles away.

I blame Barbara Kingsolver for my guilt. I read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” for my book group a month or so ago, and I am now a changed woman.

The book is built around a series of facts: that each of the items on a typical United States dinner table has traveled an average of 1,500 miles, for instance. That Americans consume about 400 gallons of oil per citizen per year directly related to food production. That 1,152 chickens can and do fit into a 6 x 8 room, and they are stuffed full of antibiotics before becoming Chicken Tenders.

Kingsolver and her family decided to spend a year being “locavores,” eating only what they could buy locally or had produced themselves on their Virginia farm. No out-of-season oranges or tomatoes. No Alaskan salmon. No two-mass-produced-feedlot-beef-patty Big Macs.

The book (which is hilarious, by the way) chronicles that year, which they not only made it through, but set down as a blueprint for their life to come. And far from feeling deprived, the family has found that eating fresh, local, in-season food is actually the best taste sensation they’ve ever experienced.

Eat a home-grown tomato and tell me they’re not right.

OK, so my guilt isn’t all their fault. Husband and I have long been concerned about the world’s resources, and we do what we can, in our small, American way, to be a part of the conservation movement. We bike. We compost. We garden, a little. We use a solar water heater. We recycle everything we can think of. We use the clothesline as often as a northwestern Oregonian reasonably can.

But we also eat tortilla chips packaged in Plano, Texas. We buy massive quantities of bananas, most of them from Central America. We consume fast-food hot dogs and hamburgers made heaven knows where, with meat from animals living in conditions of heaven knows what.

We could do better.

That’s what Kingsolver says. Here’s an excerpt from the book that you can find on her website. It’s written by her husband, Steven Hopp:

“If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That’s not gallons, but barrels.  Small changes in buying habits can make big differences.  Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.”

Even Kingsolver couldn’t go completely, um, cold turkey. Nobody in that household was giving up coffee, for instance, and they found no reasonable alternatives to olive oil. But they did look for organic, sustainably-grown stuff from as close to home as they could get.

I can do that, too. I can and should and will and am, at least, more often now than I used to.

I now get my milk from a dairy in Crabtree and some of my cheese from one in Sweet Home. A coworker sells eggs. I’m growing lettuce and peas, but I’m purchasing those items from farmer’s markets until my own are ready. I’m trying to pick and process enough fruit this summer to keep us in jam year-round.

Unexpected benefit from going more to farmer’s markets than to the store: I am spending less money on impulse buys. Not sure yet if it’s offsetting the often higher cost of the local stuff, but it’s a start.

When I do go to the store, I’m choosing Northwest brands as much as possible: Tillamook, Santiam, Umpqua. I buy bread made in Portland and apples from Washington. Husband and I joke that if California counts as local, we’ll be just fine.

I have a friend who tries to stick as much as possible to buying from the North American continent, which includes Mexico. But even she buys the occasional pineapple. You could force yourself to do otherwise, true, she says, but That Way Lies Madness.

Along those lines, I continue to buy processed-elsewhere items, chiefly crackers and pasta and cereal. I’m trying to do more local meat, but it’s just so darned hard to overlook, say, chicken for a buck a pound. And I just don’t know any reasonable alternatives to baking soda, salt and pepper.

And like I said, I went ahead and bought that can of pineapple. Tomorrow, I’m putting some of it in a smoothie made with local yogurt and hand-picked strawberries.

I might drink it with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, but hey, you do what you can.