The 100-Mile Diet
A Review of the Book by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon
In their book about eating locally, two young writers honestly and openly describe their experiences living on food from within a 100-mile radius. It's a book of hope.
In March 2005, a young couple in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada decided to eat only food grown or harvested within 100 miles of their home. For a year, Alisa Smith and James (J. B.) MacKinnon, both writers, lived by their set of 100-mile rules. They started a website with a blog of their progress, and in spring 2007 they published a book of their experiences.
The book, The 100-Mile Diet, A Year of Local Eating (Random House Canada, ISBN 978-0-679-31482-0), or, in the USA, Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (Crown Publishers, ISBN 978-0-307-34732-9) is an engaging read. However, it is not a "pure play" of a book. It's not a cookbook, but it has recipes. It's not a love story, but it has anecdotes and an ongoing narrative of the relationship between Alisa and James. It's not a rant or an environmental manifesto, but it does set an example of how real people can effect change.
One frequent comment on 100-mile eating is, "How can it be possible to do this while living in a cold area?" On the one hand, the Aboriginal peoples of the world had solved that problem long ago, but post-contact things are different. Modern lifestyles don't include hunting and gathering, except recreationally. Many traditional foods have become extinct, rare, or polluted by human activities.
And how about growing one's own crops? Alisa and James write about doing some of this, although they are self-admittedly not the most ardent gardeners. Instead, they are very good at finding local suppliers of fresh, organic foods in their region.
Some parts of the book are funny, as they describe the monotony of the end-of-winter cabbage and potato diet, or the potato clan escaping from their dark closet prison through sheer force of shoot power. Some parts seem almost idyllic, and out of the reach of the ordinary mortgaged suburbanite, for example, their summer retreat in a rundown house in a northern B.C. ghost town. It was enchanting to read about the fruit trees growing there, but sadly, escaping to the rural life is not an experience open to most people.
Overall, the 100-Mile Diet book is a sincere and gentle story of two young people trying to make a change. Courageously, they started with themselves, and honourably, they held true to their own rules. The strength of this book is that, despite the varying circumstances readers around the world will find themselves in, there is a message here for anyone: If they can do it, so can I.
