Photos by Steve Rice LEFT: Weed your own damn onions! Andrew Cullen, chef at the Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis, pulls weeds at the Riverbend Farm in Delano, Minn. RIGHT: Michelle Steffen, pulls wild buckwheat from the onion rows at the Riverbend Farm in Delano. Karly Burch seems to love pulling weeds. Squatting between rows of onions at Riverbend Farm in Delano, Minn., the 23-year-old Minneapolis resident explains why she's so smiley about spending a day getting her hands dirty.

"I thought it would be neat to meet some people in my community and help out at a place that supplies food to somewhere I eat," Burch says.

That place where she eats is Common Roots Cafe, a restaurant at 26th Street and Lyndale Avenue S. in Minneapolis that's the ultimate role model for using ingredients from local growers and producers.

"Any way we can connect people with where their food comes from is helpful," says Common Roots owner Danny Schwartzman, whose ingredients earlier this summer were 90 percent local, organic or fair-trade. "It gets people thinking about what they're eating."

Schwartzman invited customers to spend a day at Riverbend, meeting farmer Greg Reynolds and working with the organic onions, which customers will eat in soups and salads later this year.

That desire to know where your food comes from, spend locally, do a good deed for the environment and eat fresh means that the "eat local" movement in the Twin Cities "has exploded within the last three or four years," says Brian DeVore of the Land Stewardship Project, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable agriculture. "In the Midwest, food travels an average of 1,500 miles to get to us, which is just ironic since we produce so much food here."

Photos by Steve Rice LEFT: After a morning of pulling weeds at the Riverbend Farm in Delano, volunteer workers walk back to the barn for lunch. RIGHT: Danny Schwartzman, owner of Common Roots Cafe, picks peas at the Riverbend Farm in Delano. A group of owners, workers and frequent diners at the Common Roots Cafe and Birchwood gathered on a Monday to weed onion beds and pick peas. Demand for farmers markets and "community-supported agriculture" (CSA), in which you buy a share of a farm and get weekly fresh produce in return, continues to grow. Plus, more young Minnesotans are getting interested in the Land Stewardship Project's beginning farmers' program, which teaches the ropes of running a sustainable agriculture business.

Trotter's Cafe, at Cleveland and Marshall Avenues in St. Paul, has been serving affordable meals with local ingredients for 18 years. "Our philosophy all along has been to give the customer the freshest thing we can get," says owner Dick Trotter. "That's getting easier."

"We can buy direct from the farmer and it cuts out the middle man, so I know where it's coming from, and that really makes a difference to me," he says.

Agri, a new restaurant at 43rd Street and Bryant Avenue S. in Minneapolis, is also buying local. "There's classic Minnesota foods everybody knows about like, our maple syrup or blueberries or wild rice, but do people know how fantastic the eggs are or that during the summer, you can get just about every vegetable here?" points out chef Dan Alvin.

With soaring fuel prices and future energy concerns, Alvin says it's important to support local growers and producers now so we'll have a solid infrastructure of food available later. "If foods we're used to having easily and cheaply suddenly become inaccessible and we haven't established and supported a network of local growers, then when we do need a local food system, we'll be sorely lacking in our capacity to feed ourselves."

We ordered an all-local meal at Common Roots Cafe: roast-beef sandwich, salad and a beer, plus the tart for dessert. Where did everything come from? Let's reverse-engineer the ingredients: