The 100-Mile Diet- A Year of Local Eating

Co-authored by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon, a couple who decided to try a local-eating experiment for one year, limiting themselves to a 100-mile radius surrounding their Vancouver home. By now everyone's heard of the 100-mile diet, and these are the two who coined it. Overall it was a good read, both engaging and inspiring, it had some great facts about our current global food system, some new and some I'd heard before. It definitely argues some of the common disbeliefs: I can't do this if I live in a city (they did), or it's a diet designed only for their area (they polled lots of farmers in various areas and the consensus seemed to be that if agriculture is possible in your area, so is eating local).

A couple of minor beefs though: the running commentary about relationship discontent, as far as I can tell, has no contribution to the storyline and seems misplaced. (Or maybe it is the discontent in general, which Smith expresses and seems to blame on- though ultimately fails to connect to, thus the seeming irrelevance- our culture's disconnectedness with nature and mass consumerism.) And then there is the sometimes borderline melodrama- maybe it's a characteristic of (some) writers in general, to embellish or dramatize events for the sake of story, but when it's non-fiction, and you're reading about something familiar, it's both obvious and ridiculous. Example: it is common knowledge that the earthquakes of Vancouver Island, generally minor occurrences, will cause a devastating quake sometime in the next 200 years (which works out to be something like a 5% chance of it happening today). It's not as if people walk around waiting for the sky to fall on them, but according to this book they do, all that and more:

"It is both exciting and horrible to know that the earth beneath your feet is constantly shifting. My whole generation, I think, feels these tensions. No one I know seems able to settle into one calling or one place."

Maybe it's just me, but I find this kind of stuff annoying. If I met anyone in real life who walked around daily freaking out about the minor chance of major earthquakes, I probably wouldn't be rushing out to read their memoir. I mean, I had no idea that the discontentedness and inability to commit of people today had to do with.... earthquakes. Nothing to do with being constantly bombarded by 300 to 3000 advertisements every day telling us we should be discontented with our lot (and therefore, buy more). Nope. Not that. It's the earthquakes, fellas. Golly.

Anyway, ranting aside, despite being a little overdone in small moments (and much less so than 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle', I might add) I still found it a good and worthwhile read, good food for thought, and worth recommending. Read it, and hopefully find ways to live it!