When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles. Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon call it "the SUV diet". In spring 2005, they chose to confront this unsettling statistic with an experiment. For one year, they attempted to get their food and drink from within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver. The 100-mile diet was born.
It is a form of environmentally-sound eating. "For those concerned about energy conservation, greenhouse gases, and oil dependence, the types of food we choose to eat are as important as the types of cars we choose to drive (or avoid)," explains the Organic Consumers Fund in its latest newsletter, Organic Bytes.
Industrial agriculture and long-distance food transportation generate 20-25 per cent of all climate-destabilising greenhouse gases in the US. Buying food that is locally grown can dramatically reduce energy consumption and greenhouse pollution. The strategy has given a boost to the "local food" movement. "We're the kind of people who ride our bikes everywhere, so we wondered why we were going to all this effort when our food was flying around the world," says Smith. The diet strategy is catching on across North America. See www.100milediet.org.
