Could a restaurant be so appealing, so irresistable, that you'd wait a year to get a reservation?

This one apparently is: Talula's Table in rural Pennsylvania, has been called the most difficult reservation to get in the country. Talula's is about an hour outside of Philly, has only one large farm table that seats 12, and is run by a husband and wife team. There's a store that sells cakes, pies, soups, and over 150 different kinds of cheeses (the co-owner spent her life studying cheeses).

But the real treat appears to be the restaurant. The eight-course tasting menu, which features fresh and primarily local ingredients, is the same every day for about 5-6 weeks, and then changes depending on what's in season.

The day that one NPR reporter visited, the menu was as follows: egg custard; mushroom risotto; hand-rolled rigatoni with snails; pampano roasted with a mango-saffron broth; pork osso bucco; lamb; blue-raisin chutney semolina; and for dessert - deep breath - a coffee-infused bavarian creme with bittersweet and white chocolate over a piece of buttery shortbread, covered in a blood orange jelly.

And for the record? If you want a reservation, call them tomorrow starting at 7 a.m. The first person to call that day gets the next reservation a year from now, and the process repeats itself the next day, and the next, and the next...

A Suffolk town refused to give permission to build a Tesco superstore in their neighborhood in 1997 and, since that time, local businesses and agriculture have flourished. Despite an overall decrease in the number of smaller, independent stores throughout Britain, the number of businesses in town has remained the same and the number of local/regional food suppliers increased from 300 to 370, meeting the demand from local butchers, bakers and greengrocers. The local shops primarily source from local sources, and have not found themselves to be limited in what they can offer their customers. In fact, they have slowly been expanding into more diverse foods and vegetables as suppliers find people to grow them.

Over the past decade, many other store proposals from developers have been turned down and the locals' position gets stronger after each refusal. The hardest part is shaking the mindset that values convenience and sometimes price, over quality and belief. The locals would rather know where their food is coming from, who is selling it to them and that they are supporting quality food in their community, than save a few pennies on carrots from elsewhere in the world at Tesco.

Stores like Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have already put effort into sourcing more local ingredients, which has made customers and local business people alike very happy as well as demonstrating that local foods can be utilized on a larger scale. This is useful to note because it is not possible for the Suffolk strategy to work everywhere; some areas are simply not suited to agricultural purposes. What the Suffolk example does show is that the local food movement can still thrive in a modern environment as long as people are committed to it.