We picked miles based on looking around ourselves and asking, What is local for us? And in Vancouver, we have the Coast Mountains rising up behind about miles from Vancouver. So we picked that distance. But it seems like it's a good starting point for most people. It's not very far to drive and you could actually bike that far in a day. MacKinnon: In the simplest terms, it was a commitment to eat only food grown or raised or produced within a mile radius of our apartment in Vancouver, and that included every ingredient in every product.
AS: Well, that was something we didn't think of until we started. That's when we started to realize how many levels there are to the food system, you know -- thinking, if this chicken ate grain that came in from Alberta, what's the difference between it doing it and me doing it? So you start to realize how many levels you have to think about in the modern food system that are invisible to us. JBM: Once you start down the track, you end up pretty soon saying well, Where did the fertilizer come from to grow this?
At some point we just had to be common sense about it and do the best we could. We weren't trying to do some kind of Puritan experiment, we were just doing something that would take us as deeply into local food as possible and allow it to teach us as much as it could. AS: One of them would be to reduce your fossil fuel use, because there's all kinds of foods being flown around the world that don't need to be -- for instance, apples coming from New Zealand, or potatoes from somewhere far away in the States, when all those things can grow easily in most places in Canada -- particularly potatoes, or some other more humble vegetables.
We'd seen a study that the minimum distance food travels from farm to plate is usually 1, miles, if you buy it in the supermarket. And it seems like that's just way out of hand. JBM: That question of food miles -- how far food travels from farm to plate -- was really a starting point for us, but the list would also include spending your money within your local economy, taste -- local food typically tastes much, much better -- crop diversity, supporting small lot farming and family farms.
Reconnecting with the landscape you live in, the seasons, the people who produce your food -- the list is long. AS: Speaking of food safety, last fall there was a huge scare with organic spinach -- it turned out so much of the spinach was being packaged in the same plant, that if one bit of contamination gets in, this is affecting hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, across the continent. And that's quite scary. I think it turned out to be partly because of being packaged in plastic, and supposedly prewashed -- people weren't washing it themselves before they ate it.
But if you buy it from a local farmer, even if somehow something went wrong with the system -- which it's less likely to because less people are handling your food -- the damage would be very contained to a very small area, instead of killing hundreds of people. JBM: It really all started with this one meal we had in northern B.
There's no road access there -- you have to get in by boat or by train -- so you can't just run out to the corner grocery or the supermarket. We put together a meal out there that was totally drawn off the local landscape. We caught a fish, we went foraging for mushrooms, we picked apples out of an abandoned orchard, picked dandelion greens, and it turned into this incredibly flavourful meal, because everything was just so fresh.
It also was the first time that either of us could remember really knowing where all of our food had come from and really being a part of the process and the story of our food. That's really what got us thinking, Could we eat like this in the city? Was it even possible to still do that? And if we did, then what would it look like? CL: One of the things I love is how you talk about discovering all of these different foods.
What are some of the more interesting foods you discovered? AS: I keep thinking of one we actually discovered well after the mile diet had officially ended, because we're still finding new things -- it's a fruit called a medlar. It was apparently very popular in medieval times, and it's not even ripe until after the first frost.
It looks a bit like a tiny apple and tastes kind of like a date. JBM: For me, it was a couple of things. One was melons, which I'd had no idea grew in Canada. Out on Saltspring Island we ended up getting these canteloupes, muskmelons I'd never been much of a melon fan, but I guess that's because I'd always been eating melons that had been harvested before they were ripe so that they could still be shipped.
When I had them, finally, fresh off the vine, they were so sweet that they could give you a headache if you ate too much -- they were just unbelievable. The other one for me was discovering the local seafoods. Even something as simple as sardines. The rich flavours were the evening's shallowest pleasure.
We knew, now, that out there in the falling darkness the river and the forest spoke a subtle language we had only begun to learn. It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers.
One of the night's final questions, passed around upon faces made golden by candlelight: Was there some way to carry this meal into the rest of our lives? Published by Vintage Canada. MacKinnon document their experience consuming only food that came from within a mile radius of their home. Very little in a supermarket can be traced to where all the ingredients come from and many of the products contain oils, sugar or seasonings that have travelled vast distances.
So they set about finding just who did produce food in the Vancouver area, starting in Spring. Between them they lost 15 pounds in six weeks and were forced to loosen the rules slightly to include locally milled flour from grain that at least came from Canada.
By the time summer came they had become experts at tracking down local foods. Far from being a bland and uninteresting diet, the local exploration was turning into a bountiful journey of discovery, constantly changing with the seasons.
Rather than cooking to recipes, they had to turn to their own creativity and invent new dishes from the seasonally available ingredients they had found. But abundant harvest can bring its own problems — like thousands of hours spent preserving harvests for the Canadian winter. By late summer blanching, freezing, canning, making preserves were taking a lot of time — they describe it as adding a part time job to their lives.
One of the groups that joined them in trying a mile diet distilled the political issues down to this statement: "Can we eat well Is the mile diet one that is realistic for your average person leading a busy life? No, but it was never intended to be. Alisa and James set themselves a high challenge to discover what the real issues with local food sourcing were.
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