Daily Tomorrow-An Eco-blog about green living, health and the environment

Tuesday Travels: The 100 Mile Diet

by Ali on November 20th, 2007

Eating locally is one of the best ways to green you nutrition. It allows you to eat food with lower embodied energy and enables a fresher, more seasonal table. The 100 Mile Diet is a resource to help you do both, to think globally and act locally.

The idea came from two Canadian writers, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon who woke up one day and decided to make a change - one that would that would lesson the energy intensive nature of the food they ate. They began a journey into the 100 Mile Diet determined to buy local. It was challenging at first but as their diet became more organic, non-processed and homemade the idea stuck.

Some of the perks:

Fresh, fresh, fresh. Local foods offer full flavor that is straight from the source unlike the bland hitchhikers that make their way to stores on industrial transit.

Connections. When you’re able to talk to the farmer you know what you’re eating. You could even meet the chickens who laid the eggs you eat and see how their life is on the farm.

Nature’s Back. Local means seasonal and eating local puts your body in tune with the natural cycles of the region where you live.

Resourceful. According to the 100 Mile Diet: “A study in Iowa found that a regional diet consumed 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet based on food shipped across the country. The ingredients for a typical British meal, sourced locally, traveled 66 times fewer “food miles.” Or we can just keep burning those fossil fuels and learn to live with global climate change, the fiercest hurricane seasons in history, wars over resources…”

Delicious.

You can get started online at 100 Mile Diet or check out the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally.

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POSTED IN: Healthy Eats, Tuesday Travels