it’s a special kind of gleeful weird to be concerned that your spinach is getting too hot in the winter or to walk into a humid, 75-degree hoop house and sit among huge, thriving plants while breathing in the summery scent of moist soil. It’s fun to know that, as your neighbors scrape ice from their windshields, you can casually pull and eat a fresh carrot while wearing nothing but a hat. Then, of course, the gopher showed up.

Deborah Madison’s new book is fuel for fruit fanatics. The three words of the title, Seasonal Fruit Desserts, contain many suggestions—the most blatant and mouthwatering of which are conjured by the word “desserts,” written in giant typeface on the book’s cover. That emphasis probably plays well in booksellers’ aisles but, in practice, it’s almost a constraint: The book is actually a page-by-page insurgency against the over-sugared, unimaginative indulgences that plague the American plate.

Lunch at Santa Luna lays you out.

A plot for New Mexico’s salvation: From March 11 to 12, Bioneers held the Dreaming New Mexico Food System Summit and something of a soft launch for Dreaming New Mexico’s road map to “an age of local foodsheds and a fair trade state.”

In the three years that SFR has published its locavore’s guide to Santa Fe, the local food movement has continued to feel like it’s tilting toward a full-blown renaissance. But the movement has also found some inevitable friction. Food is a key component of the economy, and the progress of a local food movement is tied to the progress of a local economy movement.

“Farming should be an occupation, a career choice that people can make a really good living at,” Arty Mangan says. To that end, Mangan is working with acclaimed ecologist Peter Warshall to develop a map and pamphlet that plot New Mexico’s way forward into a more sustainable, localized, fair trade culinary future.

You can always buy stuff, but how often can you buy essential locavore skills locally?

When buying meat in New Mexico, one has many options—grass-fed, grass-finished, natural, organic, grain-fed, Slim Jims—but only approximately a 1 percent likelihood that it’s from here. That could change. A 2008 report commissioned by Beef Industry Improvement of New Mexico says branding (the marketing kind) would be a huge boon to the local beef industry.

ln a brightly lit classroom at Salazar Elementary School, two dozen 9- and 10-year-olds wield knives, have direct access to large amounts of flour and crowd in tight groups around three small tables, vying for a turn to take part in a single activity. The weird thing is, they’re all perfectly well-behaved.

The future really ought to be now. If 2010 isn’t the future, we don’t know what is and we’re starting to get suspicious about whether or not it’s ever going to show up. New Mexico’s future has to do with more than just Virgin Galactic’s spaceport and Chevron’s 1 megawatt concentrating photovoltaic power array—there are a host of local and regional initiatives we’re also waiting around for that aim to improve daily life and local living.