Alisa Smith, left, and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. (Random House Canada)
In 2005, longtime vegetarians and environmentalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon decided to up the ante on their eco-friendly ways. After discovering that the food eaten by the average North American travels 1,500 gas-guzzling miles from farm to grocery store, the Vancouver couple decided to spend a year eating only food grown within a 100-mile radius of their downtown apartment.
Gone were sugar, rice, lemons, ketchup, olive oil, peanut butter, orange juice and even, until they could track down a local wheat farm, flour. One of MacKinnon’s love offerings to a rapidly diminishing Smith — the pair lost a combined 15 pounds during the first few weeks of the diet — was a sandwich with slices of turnip standing in for bread.
It was only natural that couple would end up writing about the experiment. Both are freelance journalists, members of a circle of non-fiction Vancouver writers called the FCC. After they posted their first dispatch about the diet on the local website The Tyee, they were flooded with e-mails from around the world, connecting them with a nascent global movement of locavores.
Their new memoir, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, joins the growing canon of books about ethics and food — from classics like 1987’s Diet for a New America by Baskin-Robbins ice cream heir John Robbins and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (1982), to recent bestsellers like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Smith and MacKinnon’s book is even part of its own publishing trendlet, the green memoir (think: A Year in Provence with an eco-consciousness). Novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life — about her family’s move from Tucson to a farm in Appalachia, where they learn to grow their own food — is due out later this spring. And New York author Colin Beavan is currently at work on a book and a blog about his family’s year-long experiment to live without creating any garbage.
In Toronto at the start of their book tour, Smith and MacKinnon spoke with CBC Arts Online about the taste of real food, the strain the diet put on their relationship and the myth of the yuppie-foodie local eater.
Q: In the beginning of the book, you come across as being very naïve about what the experiment would entail. How much planning did you do before you started the diet?
Alisa Smith: It was James’s idea and he had been trying to convince me of it for about two months, but we were naïve, I guess. We picked the first day of spring, thinking it was symbolic — the beginning of the growing season and all that. But we hadn’t really thought through the logistics. It’s not even till the start of May when the farmers’ markets in Vancouver begin to sell produce. So for the first few weeks, we ate a lot of potatoes.
J.B. MacKinnon: It was cold turkey. We hadn’t spent any time thinking about where we were going to source the food; we just had the idea and sort of attached ourselves to it and jumped in with both feet. We were aware of farmers’ markets and both of us are environmentally aware enough to realize that food security was a big issue. But in terms of actually, practically doing it as a consumer, there really wasn’t much out there for us. We had to pretty quickly figure out source lines, often straight out to the farms themselves. The local food system is just not built to serve the consumer at this point.
(Random House Canada)
Q: How soon after starting the diet did you begin to write about it?
JM: It was about two months later, I think.
AS: At first, this was something we just did for ourselves. Then, as the weeks went on, we learned so much about how to [eat locally], and about the political issues and the industrial food system, we thought that it would be silly if it was just us learning from it.
Q: You picked your own berries, canned tomatoes, picked, shucked and froze 250 ears of corn and made your own crackers. How much work does it actually take to eat this way?
JM: It was like adding a part-time job on to our full-time lives. The acquisition, the preparation of food for the future — it was a great deal of work. At the same time, the investment would pay off later on. In fall, you put away a lot of food, but in the winter all you have to do is eat the food. In the winter, we weren’t even troubled to go down to the grocery store for supplies, because we had all of it in the house. It also makes you think about the way we use time. In the past, people invested a fair bit of time into growing food, harvesting food and putting it away. Now, we overwork ourselves in office buildings so that we can afford to buy ready-made food.
Q: Why do you think this diet struck such a chord with people?
JM: Part of it is the increasing interest and concern about fossil fuel use and global climate change. But more than that, a lot of people have a sense of loss and dissatisfaction around food as an experience. Somehow, this idea tapped into that. Most people connect with it by saying, ‘Yes, this is the way we used to eat when food tasted better.’ People are hungering to reconnect with the landscape they live in, the people who produce their food and the flavours of real food.
AS: In a lot of ways, it’s an extension of the organics movement. Now, we’ve gotten to the point where you can buy organic food at WalMart. That’s great, but it’s not really what the organics movement is all about. It had been intended to be a small-scale local farm movement. I think what we’re doing is the next phase.
Q: For all its benefits and good intentions, the organics movement, and even the local food or slow food movements, can come across as a trendy diet for yuppie types. How do you broaden the appeal of these kind of socially conscious diets?
JM: To be honest, that hasn’t been our experience. Most of the responses we’ve gotten have been from small towns across Canada and the U.S. Not what you’d classically think of as a yuppie, foodie crowd. When we explored this idea, most of the people we came across were anything but. They’re the ones who are hunting, and putting away their own meat and growing kitchen gardens. All of these sorts of things are still happening, but they’re happening in small towns and less in the cities. The connection between urban wealthy people and gardens and farms is a brand new idea. Traditionally, it’s been the everyday person with the everyday income who grows a garden, or cans food.
AS: Yeah, I don’t know how it is that in the big cities, like Vancouver or Toronto, the movement has been driven by a wealthier consumer. But it doesn’t have to be. The backyard garden? That’s certainly far cheaper than buying vegetables in a supermarket.
Q: Why did you write the book as a memoir?
AS: Well, we knew that the last thing we wanted to write was a how-to book.
JM: Yeah, the value of what we got from the diet was difficult to pinpoint in a 10-item list, or to express in statistics. It was about the things that happened to us over the course of a year. We wanted to show readers that process, and how it affected us and let them see it through our eyes. We were profoundly transformed by this experience. If someone can walk in our shoes [by reading this], then hopefully it will have the same effect.
Q: The diet seemed to put some strain on your relationship — at one point your apartment reeked of the sauerkraut you were fermenting and you had to store potatoes in your clothes closet. You got pretty testy with each other. Why did you want to write about that aspect of following this diet?
JM: We wanted to show people that we weren’t just living some kind of fantasy of dancing from farm to farm and tasting wonderful honey all year long. We have ordinary lives and day-to-day struggles like everyone else. It did create some additional stress, because we hadn’t yet resolved that struggle of the balance of time. We had to dump all this additional time into this project that we’d only brought on ourselves.
AS: We hadn’t planned to write about our relationship when we started the book, but it made sense to do so. Food is so much a part of the fabric of your life that it’s natural to write about. And all those experiences were new to us. The next summer we didn’t freak out when we did our canning.
JM: It’s gotten easier and easier. It’s a new normal and a better normal. We’re still doing the diet and the diet is changing us, but we like the direction of the changes.
The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating is published by Random House Canada and is available in stores.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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