Eating Locally
I first encountered the term “locavore” in the in-flight magazine on my way home from vacation last week. No, it’s not a homebound dinosaur. A locavore is someone who chooses only to eat foods that are grown within a certain distance from their home – many people use 100 miles as a starting point. Like sustainability? Eating seasonally? Read on: this may be the movement for you.
Eating foods that are grown nearer to your home cuts down on pollution in many forms. It doesn’t have to fly or drive cross-country in a refrigerated truck, spewing emissions, to reach you. Buying local food supports your local economy, and the food you eat is fresher, cleaner, and probably tastier. For one thing, it hasn’t been knocking around in a dusty crate. For another, foods that have to travel long distances are bred for durability, not taste. Barbara Fisher, an Athens cooking teacher, calls such produce “flavorless,” and “plastic.” She prefers the local kind: “When people bite into ripe strawberries from a local farmer and the sweet juice bursts into their mouths, their eyes roll back into their heads, and they moan.”
Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon of Vancouver were among the first to try a “100-mile diet,” as they called it. Disturbed by the fact that the ingredients in typical North American meals travel an average of 1,500 (!) miles to get on the plate, Smith and MacKinnon vowed to eat only whatever foods came from within the hundred-mile circle around Vancouver for one year, starting in the spring of 2005.
According to Smith and MacKinnon, advance planning is key if you want to do it for real.
“We walked into the diet cold turkey for a full year, and it was hard. For example, we live on the West Coast, so it took us seven months to find a rogue local farmer who actually grows wheat. Meanwhile, we ate an unbelievable number of potatoes. Doing the diet the hard way taught us a lot about the current food system, but it isn’t for everybody. A more realistic approach is to plan a single, totally 100-mile meal with friends or family, and see where you want to go from there.”
In August of 2005, four San Francisco women named their group “the Locavores,” and challenged Bay Area eaters to eat only foods from their “Foodshed,” - the 100-mile region surrounding San Francisco - for a month.”With gas prices spiking, people are concerned about our dependence on petroleum,” said co-founder Jessica Prentice. “Why import apples from New Zealand when we can grow them nearby?”
Many more have followed their lead. In the past two years, locavore groups and challenges have sprouted all over North America. Google the term, and you’ll come up with about 38,700 entries. If you’d like more information, a good place to start is www.100milediet.org.
