SCHENECTADY — Dick Shave got a duck for dinner. It’s firm, fresh and — this is important when you’re only eating food grown within 100 miles — raised on a farm northeast of his family’s home.

“We’re going to have it with local new potatoes from the farmers’ market and beans from outside our door,” Mr. Shave said.

So goes a typical menu for a group in the Albany area taking support of local agriculture to an extreme. Mr. Shave and more than 55 other people involved in the “100 Mile Diet Challenge” pledge that through September they will stick to eating food produced within that distance of their kitchens (more or less).

They want to raise consciousness not only about how local meat and vegetables can be fresher and cleaner. The 100-milers want to show it’s possible to avoid food that requires a lot of fuel to ship from thousands of miles away.

This is the second annual 100 Mile Diet Challenge, which was started by an energy-conscious molecular biologist from Schenectady, Cheryl Nechamen.

The Albany challenge and others like it fit with the spirit of a time when “eat local” is a buzzword, new farmers’ markets crop up at a quick pace, and more and more community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs) offer weekly farm deliveries for a fixed price.

It helps to run a 100-mile challenge in upstate New York in September, a time when the region is awash in harvests. A challenge in March might have required participants to eat of lot of tubers from the root cellar.

While finding local meat is easy (though often pricey), the Northeast is lousy for growing popular items like rice, oranges, or coffee beans. Finding local flour can be a challenge too.