Welcome, 100-Mile Dieters!

A quick hello to everyone checking in from the 100-Mile Diet website! If you're from San Diego - or even anywhere in southern California - please make yourself known by leaving a comment. Tell me how your search for local food is going. Is there anyone out there who has committed to the September Eat Local Challenge?

My husband and I are slowly but steadily transitioning to local sources for most of our food, although we've hit some fairly substantial roadblocks (lack of milk and pastured meat being two of them). There are a lot of exciting things happening in San Diego on the local-eating scene, giving me reason to hope. I will be posting our adventures regularly!

Next week: dinner at The Linkery and a guest blogger reflects on Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma.

A Localtarian's Library: "Plenty" by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon

Alright, so it's been a bit heavy around here lately with all the philosophical discussions about the deeper meaning of eating locally. Would you like to just sit back with an entertaining read? In that case, don't hesitate to pick up "Plenty" by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, although I must warn you, you may be inspired into thinking about these deep philosophical questions yourself.

Smith and MacKinnon are the creators of the hugely successful 100-mile Diet. Since their one-year experiment to eat within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver, British Columbia (recorded first in a blog and now in this short book) they've become true eat local activists, traveling around North America to promote wise eating.

While admitting that their "actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world's hungry," they also make a convincing claim for eating locally. I was at first put off by their vegetarian, bike-riding-in-the-snow-to-save-on-gas mentality, and I almost dismissed them as, um, just the sort of people you would expect to undertake such a crazy experiment in Vancouver. They grew on me, though, and by the end of the book I was cheering for them enthusiastically.

For this couple, the whole experience was powerfully personal. As MacKinnon says in the May chapter, "I could relate to each item not only to its place but to its specific farm and to the faces of those farmers." It was a way to connect to the heritage of their city as well as the history of their families. The book is a masterful balance of brutal honesty (relationships have their hard times), informative commentary (ever wondered how to separate chaff from wheat?), and hilarious moments ("Some people have a stockbroker or a drug pusher; I now have a fisherman.")

Deconstructing Dinner (my new favorite podcast) interviewed the couple back in January. You can find it here.

Eat Local. Everyone's Doing It!

Much to my annoyance, when I type “eat local” into my internet search engine, I am swamped with results (at last count, Google brought up over 42,500,000 links), which leaves me slogging through hundreds of pages of only somewhat relevant information. In the midst of all my toil, I have discovered several Eat Local movements which are floating about on the internet. Judging by the flurry of posts on these sites, thousands have taken them up with fervor, some making commitments to eat locally for as short as a month and others as long as a year. One of the most prominent movements is the Eat Local Challenge, which has in turn birthed smaller, related movements such as the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge and One Local Summer. There is also the The 100-Mile Diet (with its accompanying book) and the Food Routes Buy Local Challenge. And then, if you haven’t had enough yet, there is Support Farms Buy Local Challenge and Eat Local Challenge (Not terribly original, this crowd).

The one thing these challenges don’t require of their participants is that the food they obtain also be organic. Which leads me to the question: Is a conventionally grown green pepper from close to home better than an organic green pepper grown 1,000 miles away? The Eat Local movement seems to think so, and admittedly, there are some great incentives to buying local. Just the same, I would like to prove that it's not necessary to have to choose one over the other.

Thank you to everyone who has responded with enthusiasm about this undertaking! I encourage you to subscribe to the feed (scroll to the bottom of the page).