The 100 mile diet

Have you ever stopped to consider where your food comes from? Like, how far did it travel to arrive on your plate? Or in your cupboard? Or fridge? How much of our food is imported from abroad? These are questions in previous years I hadn't put much thought to. But in the past couple years, the idea of trying to eat locally, to eat more whole foods and to have a better idea of where my food comes from has been a more pertinent thought in my mind.

I've been doing a lot of reading online about this topic, and came across some references to the "100 mile diet" - which is a book written by a Vancouver couple that decided to eat only local foods (as they defined, grown within 100 miles of their vicinity) for an entire year. Think about that for a minute. No coffee. No bananas. No mangoes. Nothing that needs to be imported. So if you can't find locally made baking soda or baking powder, you're out of luck for baking for a year. Or it becomes a lot more challenging. Same thing for wheat, yeast, tea, peanut butter (gasp!)....the list goes on and on. When you start to think about all the items that fill our cupboards that are imported from the US, Mexico, South Africa, China - it starts to make you think about the gallons and gallons of fossil fuels fuels that are burned up for our eating pleasure. It also makes me wonder what kind of growing rules the farms in China or Mexico or California follow. Do they have the same rules and ethics that our farmers have?

I don't think I can give up my tea, or peanut butter. But it does make me feel motivated to start researching local things - like flour, meat, dairy - I don't even know if there are farms that supply flour in this area. But I'm going to find out. And I'm going to get out to the farmer's market more often!