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Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet , by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon offers some great flavors to mull around your head.  Do you remember your first drink of milk? Or your first bite of food?  Probably not, but I can assure you that it was probably a different kind of food than what you are eating now.  “According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, the food we eat now typically travels between 1, 500 and 3, 000 miles from farm to plate.” In Plenty, (Three Rivers Press, 2007) Alisa Smith, and J.B Mackinnon share these kind of thought provoking statistics amidst their entertaining anecdotal account of living together and trying to eat food grown within a one hundred mile radius of their urban Vancouver home.

Do you remember the first time you fought over food? Or what argument peppered one of your meals as it was being prepared in your kitchen?  Smith writes about her take on eating local foods in a genuine and surprisingly honest way.  She shares information about herself that most people would not admit even to themselves. She questions her relationship with co-author Mackinnon, yet does not linger on this flavor for too long.  She is too busy filling us in with lovely anecdotes and stories to make her passages a well salted meal.  Smith’s sieves through her cookbook and shares with us memories of her grandmother; a woman who inspires her and places her current project under perspective. She has a great time detailing her long bike treks in the rain or her rational behind trying this nearly impossible task of eating so close to home.  “I sat at my desk, curiosity and suspicion aroused.  How would he make a sandwich? We had no bread, only a few tablespoons of remnant flour. He flourished a hand toward what appeared to be a sandwich festooned with a red-tipped deli toothpick.  It actually looked beautiful, like something you might see in an upscale restaurant. Layers of bright red greenhouse peppers, and fried mushrooms peeked out beneath delectably oozing goat cheese.”

J.B Mackinnon’s whips more research into his writing which gives the reader more meat for this mostly vegetarian read.  He is the main cook in this story and shares simple recipes at the beginning of each chapter.  The couple struggle with finding some basic ingredients, what we would consider essential foods.  For many months most of their meals consist of potatoes, cooked in a variety of styles.  “Seeds left, chaff right; seeds left, chaff right. I uncovered a rat turd the size of an olive it and carried it directly to the garbage. At the peak of the pile of wheat berries stood an insect, head lifted to the breeze like a mountain sheep on a backlit skyline ridge. “If you want to see a weevil, there’s one walking across the cutting boar right now,””

Both authors live in a small apartment that continues to be filled with local produce hidden in sock drawers, boxes and planters on fire escapes.  “Then there was my former clothes cupboard, the one now used for winter stores. The bottom shelf housed a twenty-five pound bag of organic yellow onions… The upper shelves help twice that weight in organic russet, red and French fingerling potatoes…”   They amase this food by meeting local farmers and visiting their broiled summer home in Doreen. As the year goes by the authors try their hand at making cheese, sauerkraut, canning tomatoes, pickling and growing herbs.  These food items become the back drop for friends to come to support the process by adding their own unique views of eating and sharing food. “He needed a place to stay, he announced, and he’d been in a fight.  He had a broken head. A broken hand. A broken life, really.  In my family, this is how people ask if you might want to come home for a visit.”

Since both Smith and Mackinnon must make a living as reporters, they travel at times and eat outside of their diet.  They must make money to support their expensive project.  “ …the grocery bill for that single meal had come to $128.87”  I have looked into the possibility of following in their footsteps, but my budget does not permit such elaborate spending.  I live in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado and all foods are grown here, but my food bill would increase 200 % if I ate locally.  The authors bring up some good lubrication to motivate me to look further then buying foods the easy way  “Supermarkets have another idea entirely. To them, “local”, covers a whole province or state, or even an entire country.  Signs announcing “CDN/USA grown” are increasingly common in the produce department, as though we should be satisfied knowing that our food comes from somewhere within the world’s second- and third largest countries.”  They also explain “Organic vegetables are frequently the end products of intensive production methods, and end up on your plate after, say, crossing the continent by diesel truck and passing through a plant that washes 26 millions servings of lettuce a week”.   Both Smith and Mackinnon take a lot of time researching how they can purchase food locally but affordably.  They visit farms, learn about their systems and buy in bulk. In this way they claim that there food bill, was similar to conventional levels.

Parents benefit from reading this book, because it shows us that there is so much more to food then simply buying, cooking and eating.  Our children, experience food, and food becomes who they are.  When the authors describe their efforts in planting a garden at the local garden plot, you can feel their disappointments and triumphs over growing food.  You see that having a garden teaches about life.  “The garden seemed to have the sense that I lacked. Life was stirring here. The seeds, enclosed in muck, had divined some slight warming, a lengthening of days.”  You realize that food makes up who we are.   It becomes a disturbing thought to think that to make up the cells of your body and that of your children you have to utilize resources as far as 3,000 miles away.  A 3,000 mile cell seems like a very complex thing for such a simple thing as sustenance.

 If you are looking for a present for your child’s teacher, the principal or superintendent, think of these two books.  People like your municipal leaders or President Bush would greatly benefit from these reads.  It may remind them about the human scale of life.

If you are interested in knowing more about these books or authors, each book has inspired a movement and non-for profit work; the childrenandnature.org and the 100milediet.org.

To purchase these books click on these links:

P.S. As you plan for your holiday travels think of using a service like: Baby's Travel Lite.