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.