Could a year of potatoes be in my future?

As with many things that come and go in the mainstream of everyday life, The 100-Mile Diet was something I’d heard murmurings about but not paid much attention to. I’d noticed the book several times in small and used bookstores in Toronto and Vancouver. But my ambivalence toward most new fads prevented me from swaying into the path of the eating bandwagon and perusing the book’s pages. At some point recently this changed as one hot Sunday afternoon I found myself clutching a used edition of the book, telling myself that if I was going to have an opinion about food and how it’s produced I ought to know what people are saying.

I began to wonder, as I imagine most people who have read the book have also done, about how much of the foodstuffs I used to concoct my kitchen creations come from a further distance than the 1,500, 2,500 and 4,000 miles oft quoted by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. From Mexican agave nectar to coconut milk from the Philippines, from the dried shitakes grown in China to the rice vermicelli from Thailand, I have begun to realize that some of the food staples I rely on seem to travel far further than those of the average vegetarian and meat-eater. As much as I think of my vegan diet as being the healthiest choice for me, it has become clear that it was not necessarily a healthy choice for the planet. Veganism makes complete ecological sense, but not when the Philippine mangoes in my dessert bowl have traveled much further than the Penticton or Salt Spring Island apples I could use in apple pie.

Last summer, while still living in Toronto, I had discovered the joys of farmers markets. With two markets taking place on weekdays within a few minutes walking distance of my Front Street workplace, I began to shop for my produce almost exclusively at these markets. I was nothing short of enthralled by the excitement of finding dozens of varieties of heirloom tomatoes, three varieties of currants, golden raspberries and the freshest white onions I’d ever seen. Before these farmers markets, I’d never seen a onion with it’s thick, deep green stalk still attached, and I was awed by the visual and taste differences between these and the older, many-layered dried onions at the grocery store. I was so affected by the differences between locally produced and imported produce that I started to scrutinize the origins of the produce in the stores near my home. And I began to wonder, with much frustration, why nearly everything on the shelves came from the US when I could buy the same but fresher produce grown in Ontario’s Green Belt less than 50 miles way from my home.

One chapter into a book now famous for starting a local eating revolution, I have started to consider how my own diet might be changed to rely on seasonal eating of locally produced foods. A recent Monday lunch trip to an IGA on Burrard Street in Vancouver showed me that I might be up against more of a challenge that I am ready for. Label after label amongst the fruits and vegetables showed me that if I intended to eat a local lunch, I was almost completely out of options. I was cautiously surprised when I came across a banana label that boasted “grown in British Columbia.” I gazed at the clusters of bananas and remembered I’d heard of a banana plantation in the province’s interior near Osoyoos. But the bananas I was looking at were emblazoned with stickers declaring Ecuador as their origin. Last time I checked, Osoyoos wasn’t in Ecuador. Rather than eating a local lunch, I left with Finnish rye bread, baked beans from Greece, Tofutti cheese slices from the US and Yves vegetarian ham slices from Richmond, made with soy that might not have been grown in North America. For that matter, I could see that perhaps none of the things I'd bought included ingredients grown in either Canada or the US. During that week, several more trips to grocery stores on the west side of the city showed me that the labels identifying the origins of my apples, kale, and potatoes may not be as straightforward as they pretend to be. And my success in attempting to create a vegan 100-mile diet has become more dubious to me as the days go by.

Reading several chapters further, it dawned on me that the couple who wrote The 100-Mile Diet lived just mere blocks from my current abode and shopped at all the very same stores I now frequent. And, it seems, my dilemma about “going local” is much the same as the dilemma they faced in 2005. While I don’t eat much tofu, I do eat a lot of rice and rice-based products. If I choose not to buy rice milk made with rice most certainly not grown in British Columbia, what would my options be for breakfast? While Smith and MacKinnon’s breakfast solution was to abandon their so-called “near-vegan” diet for eggs from a farm located less than 10 miles away from our respective homes, my staunchness in remaining vegan is as permanent as the 100% vegan tattoo on my wrist. Fearing they would not get enough protein in their diets, I suppose they never thought to find out that vegetables contain protein and that even something like a 1/2 cup of cooked collards contains 4 grams of protein.

The authors of the 100-Mile Diet had a car and could drive. I neither have a car nor a license. Biking to Agassiz to get hazelnuts or out to Langley and other suburbs to the u-pick farms is not really an option available to me. With just my bike and the regional transit to rely on, is a truly vegan 100-mile diet possible?