IT STARTED IN EARNEST with a pork chop. A big, baseball-mitt-sized, bone-in pork chop, pink as a rose with an inch-thick fat cap, purchased from Cottingham Farm in Easton, Maryland.

I can’t recall the specifics, but somehow, I’d heard about this piece of meat from this particular farmer—Cleo Braver—and while back home on the Eastern Shore one weekend, I set out to find it. At the small-town St. Michaels Farmers Market, I bought two, to be thrown into a bowl of brine, then a piping-hot cast-iron pan with herbs and butter, sending their juices snapping in a campfire breeze.

Maybe it was just the warm spring evening. But in that moment, as I sat down and took the first bite, I remember deeply knowing: This was the best pork chop I’d ever eaten.

I’d been to farmers markets before. As a kid on the shore, my mom dragged me into town on Saturdays to pick out petunias for her flowerpots or perfect ears of sweet corn to accompany our crab feasts. Later, as a young adult in New York City, I’d whisk through the Union Square Greenmarket to grab apples on my rush to work. This was where I first saw ramps, rhubarb, and fiddlehead ferns—though at the time I was too broke to buy them, and too young to really care.

At first, shopping local like this was merely happenstance. A cute obligation. A hungry convenience. Now, in my 30s, with no kids, a steady paycheck, and the freedom to shop at my own leisure, this is how I buy most of my food.

Yes, this might sound insufferably pretentious. But did you know that during the right time of year, just down the road in Baltimore or on the Chesapeake Bay, you can find virtually anything you need: asparagus, celery, shallots, sunchokes, frisée, fennel, cardoons, kohlrabi, eggplant, escarole, okra, ginger—all grown right here? A fortune of fruits, from Asian pears to Italian plums. Butter that rivals the French. Grains that give sourdough a sense of place. And yes, the pork chops of dreams.

For me, discovering this, it was like a hidden world, there all along. And hard not to be amazed.

One farm slowly led to the next. Suddenly, a stack of egg cartons started piling up in my backseat, to be refilled weekly with yolks as golden as the turmeric you can also, surprisingly, find here. Soon, I was contemplating an extra freezer for other locally raised meat: chicken, lamb, beef. Eventually, I subscribed to a CSA, aka a weekly box of seasonal abundance hand-delivered from another vegetable farmer and now friend—Kathleen Moss of Fox Briar Farm—who can tell me everything there is to know about her fields and food.

There are many reasons to shop local: ethical, environmental, economic. And also because, often enough, it just tastes better. At the grocery store, food hails from around the world, arriving in your hands already weeks to months old, with little known about its origins. On local farms, ingredients are typically harvested within 24 hours, hopefully from healthier soils than industrial agriculture, helping them retain their flavor, nutrition, and shelf life.

The way I see it, all that makes my dollars go further. And also keeps many of them within my community, which these exchanges help me feel more a part of, too. Local food can be more expensive, thanks to capitalism’s economies of scale, and not everyone has the budget or access. (Note: Many farmers markets also accept nutritional benefits like SNAP, WIC, and EBT.) But in this economy, in these unhinged times, it feels like one small-yet-big thing I can do.

Sure, not everything I buy or eat is local. I’m still a sucker for Duke’s mayonnaise. My inner child craves BLTs on white bread from Pepperidge Farm. I drink bottles of wine imported from Europe. And in a pinch, you’ll find me in the produce aisle, just like everyone else. No purist here.

But waiting for the height of summer, packing my bags, heading to market, selecting the season’s very first heirloom tomatoes, bringing them home, scattering their ripe flesh with sea salt, then slowly devouring each slice as its juices run down my forearms?

To me, that's bliss.