What is the 100 Mile Diet all about?

When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically traveled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. On the first day of spring 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, from Vancouver, British Columbia, chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver. See how they did it at www.100milediet.org.

In 2006 and again in 2007, we, in the Capital District of New York State, started the 100 Mile Diet Challenge, eating only food grown or raised within 100 miles of here for the month of September, in an effort to eat healthier, support local farms, create a safe secure food supply and save energy.  Our short-term goal was to get people thinking about where their food comes from and how much energy it takes to grow, process and ship food to your local grocery store.  In the long term, we wanted to generate support for local farmers and merchants and to build a stable and secure food system.

The 100 Mile Diet Challenge was successful beyond our wildest dreams, but the movement has matured since then.  The whole nation has become aware of the benefits of eating local food so it’s no longer necessary to issue a challenge to eat locally.  My husband recently had the inspiration of the 80/20% rule: it’s easy to find 80% of our food locally; it’s the remaining 20% that’s difficult.  Now you can either obsess about that last 20% or you can decide not to worry about it.  With the 80/20% rule, our family eats locally year-round and not just at the height of the harvest season.