Ivor Mackay and the 100-mile diet
- September 18, 2007 2:09 PM |
- By Your Voice
CBCNews.ca welcomed Ivor Mackay on Friday, Sept. 21.
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Ivor Mackay and his family have been on the 100-mile diet since June 11. They follow in the footsteps of B.C.'s Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who documented their journey in 2005 in their book The 100-mile diet: A year of local eating.
Mackay and his family have taken on the challenge of surviving on what can be grown within a 100-mile radius of Edmonton, Alberta, over the next year.
"We decided to do this to see if it's possible and to reduce the carbon impact of a family eating a seasonable diet provided by local suppliers," said Mackay in his blog which chronicles his family's journey. "We would like to broaden the discussion about local food, food in general and its importance in our lives."
- Local vs. Global: 100-mile diet blog
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Comments (13)
It seems that finding food that is within 100 mile radius would take a long time and would be expensive. How much time do you spend a week finding food within 100 mile radius? Have you noticed a large difference in your grocery bill?
Ivor Mackay:
It is more expensive. There is no doubt about that. When we first started doing this... wow, can we really do this because it was very expensive and we were buying most of our stuff directly from market. But things changed by being able to go directly to the farmers and producers and buying in bulk and putting it away. We get a much better deal and they’re able to give you a better deal with larger quantities. But there’s no doubt it is a more expensive process. The flip side though is…this is what a real carrot tastes like. A lot of times when you get stuff from the stores, they have a very bland flavour.
This lifestyle would be ideal if you live in an area that is (a) at or close to a large centre (b) in an agricultural area. We live in a forest-dominated area, two hours from any other town or city - quite a bit more than 100 miles. What's your suggestion for us northerners?
What do you miss most?
Have you considered growing or started growing anything in your house (perhaps hydroponically) to increase the variety in your diet or to get things not normally grown in you area?
What have you found grown in your area that surprised you most, i.e. that you expected not to available?
Ivor Mackay:
One of the big things we miss is that we used to go out to eat, and we can’t do that any more. It’s pretty much impossible to go out to eat and find it completely local. That’s the big thing. I come from the food industry, and the social part of food as a whole is something that ends up lacking as a result because you can’t go out to eat. My wife one time was invited by some people from work to go out to eat so she said sure and she took her carrots and tomatoes with her. And the restaurant asked her to leave because she wasn’t buying anything from them and she was bringing food in.
It does affect the social aspect.
But as far as we’re starving or are we feeling that there’s no food anywhere, no, we don’t feel that.
Host:
Are you losing any weight?
Ivor Mackay:
My wife has lost more weight than I have but I attribute that to eating too much of my own bread because I have to taste it and make sure it’s right…We are slowly losing weight. The big thing is that we don’t snack the same way. We don’t snack on chocolate bars and chips...You eat better foods and you eat regularly. You have to plan your food. You have to plan your meals.
Host:
What about monotony? Is there any of that setting in?
Ivor Mackay:
Not yet...I was a chef in my former life, and that’s helped me. Helped us diversify our food…I’ve been trying to make a lot of different things and experiment.
Re: growing anything in the house
We’re planning this summer to do a herb garden. We do have raspberries so it was easy for us to pick our own raspberries.
Hello! I agree with the premise of the 100-mile diet, but wonder if you can provide tips for us Canadians in the North, for whom locally grown produce is a short-lived seasonal treat?
Hunting is a popular activity here, but as I am vegetarian, the abundance of wild meat does not satisfy my nutritional requirements!
Thank you.
Ivor Mackay:
Does this get more difficult the farther north you go?
It definitely does. There’s no doubt of that. There’s also some consideration of expanding maybe beyond 100 miles, maybe do 150 miles. Not being totally familiar with exactly how long the growing season is in some of these areas…if you’re able to grow anything at all – there’s also been some possibility of using something called permaculture where you could grow -- basically taking top soil and putting in boxes where they could get light and grow vegetables and fruits.
The other thing…is look at what they did previous to having electricity and gasoline. See if there’s some things they can do now. Obviously people survived there before and what were the methods that they used to survive.
I'm on the 100-mile diet, also. I drive 100 miles a week trying to find local produce.
Well, perhaps I exaggerate a little. We grow both beef and apples. The stores have U.S. beef and apples from Chile, China and the U.S.
Even the farmer's market does this. How do you find the local stuff ?
How do you find locally grown spices, yeast and other baking/cooking additives????
Can you comment on the amount of time required to follow this diet. i.e. researching sources, shopping time, etc.
Ivor Mackay:
It is time consuming. There’s no doubt about that part of it. I would really suggest that anyone considering doing this would work into it more slowly rather just doing it like we did or James and Alisa did it. Prior to doing, we did spend approximately three to four weeks researching trying to find various places, and fortunately we found a number of resources through websites here in Alberta...There’s also the Alberta farm fresh website which provided us a good base of people to go to or contact and that helped
around a lot.
Host:
I can imagine that it’s also taking you a lot more time to gather your food sources now.
Ivor Mackay:
Gathering is not too much of a problem. We spend the weekends doing that. Saturday morning is market time. We go to two major markets close to us. From there we’ve been able to make contacts where we arrange dropout or pickup. Sundays at this present time during the summer – it was sort of spent picking and gathering the bulk items that we wanted to put away for the winter. The weekdays we don’t really spend gathering the food. Where the time as come in is the cooking. I spend pretty much all day Sundays cooking as much as I can so I don’t have to do a lot of cooking during the week. I make my own bread so Sundays are also spent making the bread for the week.
Host:
So you’ve been able to find things like flour and yeast?
Ivor Mackay:
I actually capture my own yeast. I found a recipe online how to capture yeast and set it up and basically put potato skins and water and organic flour and away it went. From that, that’s been my starter.
What preparations are you making to get through the winter?
What have you added and/or changed in your home to allow you success in eating locally?
How have your children responded?
What was your biggest hurdle (if any)so far?
Host:
Are you a little bit apprehensive…looking towards the winter ahead that it’s going to become more difficult?
Ivor Mackay:
There’s always a degree of apprehension. We bought an extra freezer and we’ve been filling that with meat and sauces. We just canned a 100 pounds of tomatoes and that was time-consuming as well. We’ve been freezing beans and corn. We’ve been talking to farmers if we get these carrots and potatoes, how long will they last? So there’s definitely concern there, but also at the same time how we can plan and make it work.
What have been your most and least joyous discoveries?
What concerns have come true and which have been debunked?
Ivor Mackay:
My most joyous discovery thus far has to be pears. I was very surprised that anyone could even grow pears in and around here. One of my co-workers had a neighbour with a pear tree and he wasn’t using them and we were able to pick a whole bunch of them and can them. So we were pretty happy about that.
Another one would be wine. We were quite pleased that there’s a winery within 100 miles of Edmonton. Most people wouldn’t think there would be. Now it’s not a grape winery. It is a fruit winery. They make Saskatoon wine, berry wine and rhubarb wine, apple wine. It’s called en Santé wineries.
The least…I guess the biggest one would be canola oil. We can’t find Canola oil even though there are fields and fields around us. No one’s actually processing it locally. If they are processing it locally, it’s a mixture of canola from across the prairies so it’s not 100 per cent local product so it makes it very difficult. There is Highwood Crossing that does a canola oil but they’re 400 km away from us.
Host:
What do you use as a cooking agent?
Ivor Mackay:
Pretty much, butter, and a little bit of duck fat as well which is quite light.
Presumably this endeavour requires significant research and preparation. Will you make available a record of the resources and methods you find that achieve your goal so that other locals may benefit from your experience, and is there a network for such sources of information for other areas of the country?
Ivor Mackay:
We will be doing a resource list of what we’re doing. Definitely there are websites available for other parts of Canada. There’s a Manitoba 100-mile diet. If you go to 100milediet.org, you can find links there to other areas in Canada. People who are doing it, people who have done the research. Also great information for canning and preservation. We’ll do the same thing for Edmonton and the Edmonton area.
We’re blogging our experience over the whole year. On our blog site is also some of the resources. If you go to our recipes section …there is also a connection of some of the resources we used for the recipes.
Related links:
100-mile diet blog
Recipes
We’re also working with an economist at the UofA…looking at the economics of the whole adventure of the whole year, tracking how we’ve been spending the money, what we’re spending it on, tracking mileage, driving to get to things and the cost, time it takes to prepare cooking, quality of the food we’re getting…
Ivor, because you live in Edmonton, I am wondering what kind of local fruits and vegetables you and your family will live on during the winter especially.
I can understand that meat, dairy products, grain products, can readily come from within the 100 mile boundary, but not fresh veggies.
Will you eat frozen veggies that were grown in or near Edmonton? Are any local fruits available even in season, and in quantities large enough to freeze or preserve?
Ivor Mackay:
The big ones (fruits) we have are the berries: Saskatoon berries, raspberries, strawberries and apples we’ve been able to preserve…There is that availability there. And we have done beans and corn, and we’ve managed to buy some squashes so we’re hoping those will last us for a while.
How could we encourage (make it profitable for)grocers to buy within 100 miles and then to post labels on items that meet the 100 mile diet criteria?
Ivor Mackay:
We actually have a store here in Edmonton that’s embarking on that. We’ll add that to the blog as that progresses. It’s a very good question because it’s a very difficult part of all this. There’s small amount of suppliers to do this. If 1000 people did a 100-mile diet, probably won’t be a problem for most of the suppliers to maintain that. If 100,000 or 200, 000 people in Edmonton started doing the 100-mile diet, I don’t know that there would be the resource to do it. Partly because it is more profitable to grow a field of canola and maybe use it for biodiesel than to grow local foods and have them bring it to market. It’s also hard for them to compete with stuff coming out of Florida and California.
Do you have suggestions on how to apply the 100-mile diet principles for people living in Northern areas, such as Northern Ontario where there is little agriculture?