The 100 foot diet
We’ve heard it: pesticides bad, organic good.
That’s a big part part of eating well.
But there’s another part that has been getting some attention…
Eat Local.
The benefits to eating local are reducing your carbon footprint and perhaps eating food that you’re physically/evolutionarily more adapted to. For instance corn has been a huge part of the Mexican diet for a bazillion years, fish a huge part of the Japanese diet.
This is a little trickier in the US particularly areas like San Francisco where the population is largely from somewhere else.
But we can certainly focus on the carbon footprint aspect. I mean does it make sense to eat something that was grown 5,000 miles away and flown in?
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver is about she and her family eating only “local” for one year. And The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon is another book on the topic.
Being a “locavour” means eating food from within a 100 mile radius of your home. Some definitions bump that up to 250 miles.
Not an easy task to do if you consider all you consume over the course of a year. Personally, I don’t think I could give up coffee or tea and I don’t believe any of that is grown within 100 miles of me.
Smith and MacKinnon have formed an organization promoting the 100 mile diet. You can read about it and join here.
The 100 foot diet is about growing your own foot.
You can also join the newly formed social network – Freedom Gardens. This has just been started by the DerVaes family in Pasadena, California. They turned their 1/10 acre residential lot into an urban farm back in 2001. Last year they produced 6,000 pounds of food. Their goal this year is 10,000 pounds.
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Cedocous said:
Very nice!!