Eating food grown close to home
At the end of the piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about keeping our businesses healthy by shopping locally, I said I would look at some of the things people are doing in order to eat well by eating locally-produced food.
Since then, it seems that every time I turn on the radio or open a newspaper, I see some variation on this theme. For example, the CBC carried a story about a Halifax man who pledged that he would only eat food bought at the Halifax farmer’s market. He didn’t make it a whole year, done in by a craving for certain junk foods, but he tried.
What originally caught my attention was a story in the New York Times called The Year Without Toilet Paper. It was about a family engaged in a low-impact year, where the rules were that only food grown close to Manhattan would be eaten, nothing except food would be bought, no paper would be used or trash produced, and no carbon-fueled transportation would be used.
This seemed a bit over the top (try living in rural Nova Scotia without a car), but references were made in the article to a Canadian couple who decided, in 2005, that they would eat only food produced or gathered within a one hundred mile radius of their apartment in Vancouver. Both were writers; one, Alisa Smith writes mainly for magazines, while the other, James MacKinnon has written a book and is a past editor of Adbusters magazine.
They had some good reasons for taking on this experiment. The most important had to do with taste and quality. Food produced locally was fresher, they said, having been picked within the past 24 hours, and came to the consumer riper, with its full flavor. Since it didn’t have to travel thousands of kilometres, varieties known for their taste and not their ability to travel could be had.
In terms of quality, people who wanted to know how many pesticides were used on the food, whether or not the corn was genetically modified, or whether the chicken was free range, were generally able to find out this information for local food much more easily than for imported food. As well, people shopping regularly at farmers’ markets were able to get to know the farmers themselves.
Local food consumed much less oil and gas than that in a diet based on food shipped long distances; small farms were supported, money spent went into the local economy, and there were significant health benefits.
In practice, of course, there are not always farm markets to get to, but consumers need to seek out sources of local food, whether in stores or at the farms themselves. Rural Delivery, published here in Queens County, long a leader in urging people to eat locally, publishes a directory of local beef producers who sell directly to consumers in Atlantic Canada.
In any case, Alisa and James made it through the year of eating foods grown or produced within 100 miles of their apartment, and still try to follow the spirit of the experiment. Since then, 100-mile clubs have sprung up across Canada and the United States, their websites full of stories about how well people have eaten, how much money they’ve saved, how healthy they now feel.
Alisa and James ate a diet that was varied and full. They have just now published a book about their experiment, called The 100-Mile Diet, published by McNally Robinson.
A 100-mile radius drawn from the centre of Queens County would provide the food necessary for anyone. It takes in the Annapolis Valley, much of the area noted for farming in Colchester County, St. John and the Halifax area. It also provides fish, not the kind processed in China, but the kind caught off our coast and sold fresh in small markets and from refrigerated trucks.
The trick is to gain access to those foods, which will have to be the subject of another story. Meanwhile, farmers’ markets, roadside stands, specialty stores and careful shopping at the big stores will find you food grown not far from here. Using the big stores is admittedly dicey, but inspecting the labels is a revealing practice, and at least the choice can be made of using Canadian foods.
Once again, I repeat that one should not be a fanatic about this – otherwise, how would you get your chocolates and olives – but consumers can both protect local economies and drive some sense into world food transportation by placing their dollars where they matter.
