A Canadian Culinary Book Awards Silver Medal Winner

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Written by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
Reviewed by Sasha Chapman

By now, the virtues of eating locally have become so fixed in the public consciousness that even Lay’s Potato Chips have glommed onto the idea. Ads helpfully point out that it uses local potatoes to make its salty snacks. There are television series that chronicle the trials of “real” people attempting their own 100-mile diet, sourcing all their ingredients within a 100-mile radius of where they live in an attempt to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing the numbers of miles their food travels from farm to plate. And I dare you to try and find a chef in this country who doesn’t espouse the local food movement.

So it’s hard to remember that when Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon began blogging in the TheTyee.ca, chronicling their year-long adventures in eating only foods that had been grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment in Vancouver, it seemed like an eccentric idea at best. The idea is eccentric: who in their right mind would give up coffee and chocolate and lemons and avocadoes—not to mention (and this was a surprise even to the authors) wheat flour? Only a couple of deeply committed environmentalists with something to prove.

And yet, thanks to their book, The 100-Mile Diet (Random House, 2007), which anthologized and expanded upon the couple’s blog, the “100-mile diet” became one of the catchphrases of 2007. The time was clearly ripe for another back-to-the-land movement of sorts. Farmers’ markets started proliferating in cities across the country. Writers began profiling “starmers”—aka celebrity farmers. And somehow, Smith and MacKinnon managed to make the tale of their crackpot endeavour funny, endearing and ultimately moving. It was impossible not to get swept up in their enthusiasm, as they discovered the pleasures of picking 29 pounds of strawberries (“The pleasure of a year’s first fruit against your teeth!”), just as it was impossible to answer the strange facts they uncovered about our current food system: that the average ingredient travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, or that just two per cent of Americans now live on farms.

Smith and MacKinnon strike just the right tone in their book—informing and delighting their readers with personal tales, instead of preaching to them. In the end, their idea—that we could all benefit from seeking out a few more local foods in our diet—was irresistible. Not only is the book a portrait of a couple deeply committed to living well (in the fullest sense of the word), but it’s also a portrait of southern B.C.’s foodscape—a foodscape that many of us had forgotten, and that would be endangered if it weren’t for vocal activists like Smith and MacKinnon.

Of course it’s arbitrary—if not downright odd—to draw the line at eating foods that only come within a 100-mile radius of your house. But the idea behind it, that we can and must take pride and pleasure in the foods grown in our backyards is fundamental to a healthy food culture on so many levels. Not simply because you may reduce your carbon footprint by reducing the number of miles your food travels to your plate. Nor because food tastes better when it has changed fewer hands and is eaten in season. Preserving a local food system is really about preserving ourselves. After all, we are what we eat, and if we hope to know who we are—as Vancouverites, as Torontonians, as Montrealers—we need to celebrate the foodscapes that surround us.

---

Sasha Chapman is an award-winning journalist who writes about food for the Globe & Mail, Toronto Life, Saveur and Reader’s Digest.