The 110 Mile Diet - Book Review

100 Mile Diet – A Year of Local Eating

No, you don’t need to walk a 100 miles to lose weight, and if fact this book is not about shedding the personal pounds at all. It is about leaving a lighter environmental footprint on our fragile planet.

The book is a chronicle, told in alternating chapters by the two authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, of their year of eating nothing that they could not source within a 100 mile radius of the downtown Vancouver apartment. The impetus for the experiment was the growing realization that our food travels a very long way to get to us. Consider the Caesar Salad. Lettuce from California, olive oil and parmesan from Italy, anchovies from Spain, Worcestershire sauce from England. A trip of thousands of kilometers, all thanks to our ultimately doomed oil-based global transportation system.

It is a tale of a personal relationship struggling under the stress of no chocolate, no pepper, no olive oil, no ginger. The sorrow of weeks of beets and potatoes. The joy of sourcing wheat and thus pancakes, for the first time in 9 months. It is a tale of two people reconnecting with the local food farmers, farmers markets, and learning to taste, to really taste and appreciate their food for the first time.

What started as a personal experiment has grown into a movement. Check out www.100milediet.org for the full story, to find how you can benefit from eating locally, to see personal stories from other local eaters, and to find an ever growing list of local producers across Canada and the United States.

The Road to Hell is Paved with HOV Lanes.

Carpool lanes, also known as HOV lanes or diamond lanes are designed as a relatively low cost solution to traffic congestion. The underlying logic is simple. If every car contained two people then we would have half as many cars on the road, and traffic congestion, the main cause of the ironically named “Rush” hour, would disappear. And while the logic is simple, the reality is less clear.

For example, in Vancouver a special HOV lane was built on one of the busiest in the city. While the number of cars with more than one rider in the morning commute increased from 600 to nearly 1,000, the number of single-occupant vehicles increased 46% to 5,200. That wasn’t foreseen. Neither was the 8% decline in bus ridership. It seems that as people began to ride-share and moved into carpool lanes, it freed up capacity in the regular lanes, encouraged more people to take the route, and because the bus riders saw only a 3 minute saving with the new lane, many of them abandoned the bus in favor of their cars.

So the HOV Lane caused less bus ridership, and in the end, more traffic. Somewhere there is a city planner banging his head on the desk.