Living On The 100 Miles Diet, Part 2
by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada 
on 07.20.05
A reader of Treehugger has criticized the 100-mile diet experiment and "food miles" research and it made us reflect on the articles. We think that their worth depends largely on how you look at them. Take the 100-mile diet experiment: If you think the series of articles is a call for everyone to turn to a similarly strict diet and renounce most of their favorite foods because they are not produced locally, then yes, it's pretty pointless to wish for much change to happen that way. But if you look at the articles as an experiment that aims at raising awareness about how much energy goes into what is on people's plates and encourage them to make some changes to their eating habits, then the series of articles will probably be successful. Lets have a look at part 2 of the 100 Miles Diet: In it, the couple decides to make some compromises to their near-vegan diet and start looking for local organic eggs. Predictably, things get a little complicated.
They do find a suitable local organic farm that raises chickens, but to read about that you'll have to look at the article.
What interested us most was this:
When it comes to eating locally, we've had to abandon strict vegetarianism.
The strange fact is that vegetarianism as commonly practiced is, like the rest of the industrial food system, propped up by the globalization of food and everything that it entails, including a total disconnection between food consumers and producers, and the cataclysmic ecological costs of shipping food around the world. At its worst, global vegetarianism is still cleaner and greener than global meat-eating, and is certainly more humane. On a local level, though, the questions are more complicated.
Globalization of food production has rewarded high volume and low costs so much that it can sometimes be hard to find variety and quality on the local level. We're curious to know: Are our readers that try to eat local food as much as possible faced with similar dilemmas? If you can't find something locally, do you buy it anyway or do you do without? How much are you ready to give up to stay local?
::Wanted: A Perfectly Local Chicken, ::100-Miles Diet Part 1
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Our family (two adults, one child) will be experimenting with the 100-mile diet in a short while. It will be for only month. The utility in the experiment for us is to become aware of the products that are locally produced. Doing the 100-mile diet will force us to do research on the area we just recently moved into.
After the month has elapsed, we will hopefully come out of it with a greater knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of what is grown/produced locally, and only use non-local goods as a supplement. Basically, it comes to doing the best we can, yet still enjoy lifes pleasures.
Imagine if a tenth of new york city, decided to follow the 100 mile diet, then there would not be enough food to sustain them.
Now if we spread this concept to every citizen of the united states, people would be forced to disperse evenly across the arable land, thus causing more destruction of forests for farmland and building on rural land. Is this progress?
Also, I somehow legitmately feel scared for the children of the above poster, it seems somewhat cruel to force a child to live on raw food unless their is proper knowledge of preparation. I am just imagining kids being forced to eat meal after meal of apples. Am I completely off base here?
now that i have reread the post of the parents, i retract my statement will full apologies. These parents seem reasonable and prepared.