farmers market

Have you heard of the 100 Mile Diet? For once, it’s nice not to hear the word “diet” associated with the latest weight loss craze. Instead, the 100 Mile Diet, or Challenge, is all about the environment and the importance of eating locally.

The challenge is to include only foods grown within 100 miles of your residence. This is not only good for your global footprint, it’s also great for supporting your local economy, and some would also say that it’s more healthful to eat from your local region as well.

There’s a non-fiction book on the subject by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon titled, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (or Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally). A year might be a long time to go completely local, but the concept is something that could be adopted more and more into our daily lives. Depending on where you live, it can be challenging to eat locally during the winter months but with the arrival of summer, these next few months are a great time to focus on sourcing closer to home.

The 100 Mile Diet coincides with the local food movement, and some people call themselves Locavores. It’s all about connecting to food producers and food consumers in the same geographic region and developing a more self-reliant food network.

There are a multitude of reasons to think more locally. It improves local economies and communities; local food initiatives often promote sustainable and organic farming practices.

Consider the distance that a food like coconut might have to travel before it reaches you.

The global food model often has food traveling absurdly long distances before it reaches the consumer. The environmental cost of transporting one coconut starts to be really silly, and not at all green when you stop to think about it.

Supporting farmers’ markets and visiting local farmers is a great way to source locally, and also to connect in a more conscious way with the food we eat. You might also find little neighborhood grocery stores to support the people in your community. Whenever possible, pick the foods that come from closer to home. Often, when you stop to read where the apples in the grocery store have come from, there will be a local option sitting beside an apple that’s come from several hundred miles again.

Portland_Farmers_MarketAwareness and then shopping with your dollar is part of the local consciousness. While you might not be able to source cooking oils, rice, sugar, and similar products locally, there are so many foods that you’ll find are actually available in your own backyard. You can also plan ahead and preserve food over the next several months to consume over the winter.

What grows in your area? What foods do you consume that could be sourced locally? With a little effort, what starts as a challenge will become a new mindset, and then a new way of life.

 

Jennie LyonAbout Jennie Lyon

Jennie Lyon is a green lifestyle writer and the owner of Sweet Greens, the award-winning green lifestyle blog. She posts on simple, fun ways families can go green together – starting with her own. When she isn’t blogging, you will find her paddleboarding, sailing, beach-combing, camping, or spending time with her amazing husband and 13-year old son.

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