Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Social Science Agriculture & Food

The 100-Mile Diet

A Year of Local Eating

by (author) Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon

Publisher
Random House of Canada
Initial publish date
Oct 2007
Category
Agriculture & Food, Personal Memoirs, Slow Cooking
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780679314837
    Publish Date
    Oct 2007
    List Price
    $22.00

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

The remarkable, amusing and inspiring adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment.

When Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon learned that the average ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the people and places that produced what they ate. For one year, they would only consume food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment. The 100-Mile Diet was born.

The couple’s discoveries sometimes shook their resolve. It would be a year without sugar, Cheerios, olive oil, rice, Pizza Pops, beer, and much, much more. Yet local eating has turned out to be a life lesson in pleasures that are always close at hand. They met the revolutionary farmers and modern-day hunter-gatherers who are changing the way we think about food. They got personal with issues ranging from global economics to biodiversity. They called on the wisdom of grandmothers, and immersed themselves in the seasons. They discovered a host of new flavours, from gooseberry wine to sunchokes to turnip sandwiches, foods that they never would have guessed were on their doorstep.

The 100-Mile Diet struck a deeper chord than anyone could have predicted, attracting media and grassroots interest that spanned the globe. The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating tells the full story, from the insights to the kitchen disasters, as the authors transform from megamart shoppers to self-sufficient urban pioneers. The 100-Mile Diet is a pathway home for anybody, anywhere.

About the authors

Alisa Smith is an award-winning journalist and author. Her best-selling first book, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (Vintage Canada, 2009), won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, the Canadian Culinary Book Award and the American Cordon d’Or Award of Literary Merit. She has contributed to many publications including Canadian Geographic, Explore and the National Post, and she is the recipient of several National Magazine Awards. She is pursuing a designation as a forensic accountant. She lives in Vancouver, BC, where she is working on the sequel to Speakeasy, Doublespeak.

Alisa Smith's profile page

J.B. MacKinnon is a celebrated independent journalist and a contributing editor to the magazines Adbusters, Explore and Vancouver. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Foundation Gold Award for travel writing, he splits his time between Vancouver and a cabin in northern British Columbia. MacKinnon's latest book is The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating.

J.B. MacKinnon's profile page

Excerpt: The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (by (author) Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon)

March
Man is born free and everywhere is in chain stores.
Graffiti

The year of eating locally began with one beautiful meal and one ugly statistic.

First, the meal. What we had on hand, really, was a head of cabbage. Deep inside its brainwork of folds it was probably nourishing enough, but the outer layers were greasy with rot, as though the vegetable were trying to be a metaphor for something. We had company to feed, and a three-week-old cabbage to offer them.

It wasn’t as though we could step out to the local megamart. We – Alisa and I – were at our “cottage” in northern British Columbia, more honestly a drafty, jauntily leaning, eighty-year-old homestead that squats in a clearing between Sitka spruce and western redcedar trees large enough to crush it into splinters with the sweep of a limb. The front door looks out on a jumble of mountains named after long-forgotten British lords, from the peaks of which you can see, just to the northwest, the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle. There is no corner store here. In fact, there is no electricity, no flush toilet, and no running water but for the Skeena River rapids known as the Devil’s Elbow. They’re just outside the back door. Our nearest neighbour is a black bear. There are also no roads. In fact, the only ways in or out are by canoe, by foot over the distance of a half-marathon to the nearest highway, or by the passenger train that passes once or twice a day, and not at all on Tuesdays. So: We had a cabbage, and a half-dozen mouths to feed for one more autumn evening. Necessity, as they say, can be a mother.

I can’t remember now who said what, or how we made the plan, or even if we planned it at all. What I know is that my brother David, a strict vegetarian, hiked to the mouth of Fiddler Creek, which straight-lines out of a bowl of mountains so ancient they make you feel perpetually reborn, and reeled in an enormous Dolly Varden char. Our friends Kirk and Chandra, who are the sort of people who can tell a Bewick’s wren from a rufous-crowned sparrow by ear, led a party into the forest and returned with pound upon pound of chanterelle, pine, and hedgehog mushrooms. I rooted through the tall grass to find the neglected garden plot where, months earlier, we had planted garlic and three kinds of potato; each turned up under the spade, as cool and autonomous as teenagers. Alisa cut baby dandelion leaves, while her mother picked apples and sour cherries from an abandoned orchard, and rosehips from the bushes that were attempting to swallow the outhouse. The fruit we steeped in red wine – all right, the wine came from Australia. Everything else we fried on the woodstove, all in a single huge pan.

It was delicious. It was a dinner that transcended the delicate freshness of the fish, the earthy goodness of the spuds that had sopped up the juices of mushrooms and garlic. The rich flavours were the evening’s shallowest pleasure. We knew, now, that out there in the falling darkness the river and the forest spoke a subtle language we had only begun to learn. It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers. One of the night’s final questions, passed around upon faces made golden by candlelight: Was there some way to carry this meal into the rest of our lives?

A week later we were back in our one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, surrounded by two million other people and staring out the sitting-room window. We have a view of a parking lot and two perpetually overloaded Dumpsters. It was as good a place as any to contemplate the statistic. The number just kept turning up: in the reports that Alisa and I read as journalists; in the inch-long news briefs I’ve come to rely on as an early-warning system for stories that would, in a few months or a few years, work their way into global headlines. According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, the food we eat now typically travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to plate. The distance had increased by up to 25 percent between 1980 and 2001, when the study was published. It was likely continuing to climb.

I didn’t know any more about it than that. It was enough. Like so many other people, Alisa and I had begun to search for ways to live more lightly in an increasingly crowded and raggedy-assed world. There is no shortage of information about this bright blue planet and its merry trip to hell in a hand-basket, and we had learned the necessary habit of shrugging off the latest news bites about “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico or creatures going extinct after 70 million years–70 million years–on Earth. What we could not ignore was the gut feeling, more common and more important than policy-makers or even scientists like to admit, that things have gone sideways. That the winter snow is less deep than it was when we were children, the crabs fewer under the rocks by the shore, the birds at dawn too quiet, the forest oddly lonesome. That the weather and seasons have become strangers to us. And that we, the human species, are in one way or another responsible. Not guilty, but responsible.

The gut feeling affects people. I received a letter once, as a journalist, from a young man who had chained himself to a railing in a mall on the biggest shopping day of the year in America, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and set himself on fire to protest rampant consumerism. He survived, barely, and was ordered into mental health care, but all of his opinions were of a kind commonly held by some of the most lucid and admired ecologists and social theorists of our times. A friend of mine, a relationship counsellor, told me of a couple whose marriage was being tested by a disagreement over the point at which the world’s reserves of cheap petroleum will surpass maximum production and begin to decline. Concerned for his child’s future in an “end of oil” scenario, the husband, an otherwise typical health-care provider, wanted to go bush, learn how to tan buckskins, teach their boy to hunt and forage. The wife, equally concerned for the child, preferred everyday life in a society where carbonated soda is the leading source of calories in the diet of the average teenager and the New England Journal of Medicine reports that, owing to obesity and physical inactivity, the life spans of today’s children may be shorter than those of their parents. So who’s crazy?

Editorial Reviews

“Nothing you eat will look the same! This inspiring and enlightening book will give you plenty to chew on.” —Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets

The 100-Mile Diet is inspiring in its honest striving to discover what has been all but lost.” —The Gazette (Montreal)

“Engaging, thoughtful essays packed with natural, historical and personal detail.” —The New York Times

“A highly readable, sometimes funny, and very personal book–with just the right nutrient content of hard fact to balance the spice of memoir.” —Times Colonist (Victoria)

Other titles by

Other titles by

Related lists