Why how far my food travels IS a vegan issue

My primary reason for becoming vegan has always been strictly concerned with the suffering of animals. The environmental benefits of such a diet are a secondary but important benefit, as are any of the other benefits that come from eating a healthy, whole foods-based vegan diet. When factory farming produces more air pollution than all the vehicles across the world combined, of course a vegan diet has a significant impact in reducing that pollution. But when the secondary cause of global warming is vehicle emissions - with something like 30% of greenhouse gasses being produced by vehicles - I have to seriously question how justified I am in purchasing foods with origins several continents away from where I am now.

I don't really need to be buying foods from the places I mentioned in my last post (and several other places besides) as though they are staples I must have. I really don't need coconut milk or shitake mushrooms to survive. And when I can get a bounty of fresh produce from the farmers market to fill up my fridge each week, why do I need to be buying ingredients from far-flung places? Sure, I look at the sesame oil and soy sauce in my fridge, as well as the tub of Earth Balance, nut butters and nutritional yeast, and I realize that were I to dedicate myself to eating an entirely locally sourced diet my shelves would be bare of the convenience foods I have so long taken for granted. But as I consider my feelings about no longer regularly purchasing many of the processed and fresh foods I have come to love, my hesitation in giving up something I love to eat begins to sound, to me, very much like the response meat-eaters have when asked to consider stopping their eating of animals. "But I don't want to stop eating (steak, chicken, ham, lamb, etc.) because I like it." Well, I like fresh pineapple and I'd like to continue eating it. But when the pineapple I'm could eat at any time of the year is flown in on a jet, I need to hold myself accountable for the part I play in consuming a product in which a ridiculous amount of fossil fuels was used to get it to my table. And I love my Earl Grey tea, but when the leaves are grown all over Asia and the final product created in Great Britain before it gets to Canada and, eventually, into my teacup, I really need to ask myself how much more important the pleasure of my tatse buds is than the impact my epicurean tastes have on my home and the people and animals that live on it. And, frankly, I like the relationship I have developed with the food I walk home with from the farmers market. Being nourished by a bowl full of the freshest Rainer cherries is just as wonderful but more responsible for me than a bundle of bananas.

When I first began to question the airmiles my food was racking up, one response to my musings was "What about all the people whose jobs rely on you buying the food they help produce, no matter where it comes from?" That was not a question I could answer, and for some time I thought about how those livelihoods would be affected if a significant number of people stopped buying things like tamarind paste, goji berries, jicama, and mangosteen. But what I have since discovered is the idea that perhaps these same people - like those who live in places such as Australia, Korea, and Malaysia - could possibly have more food to eat. I am talking about people who are farm labourers or factory workers who get paid pennies for producing products that are sold at higher prices in affluent countries or neighbourhoods while they themselves might not have enough money to eat or places to buy affordable food (this happens even here in British Columbia). And I am talking about some of the same people in countries whose governments have bought into trade agreements that leave their own people undernourished and their farmers dirt poor. Perhaps if the global food industries weren't tied up in exploiting resources and food for profit people would not be sitting mere miles away from silos filled with grain while their children starve to death or harvesting fields of soy created by the razing of rainforest while they and their cultures perish for the sake of my soy milk. Undoubtedly this is a complicated issue.

Money lust and convoluted politics have created a marketplace where I can buy garlic from China for dollars cheaper than garlic from the Fraser Valley. If I want a simple head of garlic, why must it be the very old, dried up, and sometimes mouldy garlic that's travelled much further than I ever will in my entire life? I wonder if it's not so unreasonable to demand that something as simple as garlic, easily grown even on my patio, could come from somewhere within my own province? It's even less unreasonable for me to go ahead and grown my own garlic, along with the fresh herbs on my ledge that aren't trucked in from Oregon or Alberta, and better appreciate the time and effort, as well as savour the result of producing something as simple as a bulb of garlic (and the garlic scapes to go with it).

For me, questioning the viability of a vegan diet that relies on ingredients that have travelled 8,000 miles or more to my plate is an issue I am beginning to take seriously because I feel I need to. My awareness of many of the converging environmental, social, and political catastrophes developing the world over creates an unavoidable sense of urgency to do something right now about how my lifestyle habits impact animals and people living halfway across the world. When I first became vegan, adjusting to my choice meant discovering new ways of shopping for, cooking, eating, and enjoying food. Now, my choices as a vegan have led me along paths that have me thinking perhaps my answer to making an even lighter impact on the planet (and the animals mercy to the detrimental effects of human activities) lies in a greater focus on eating locally as much as I possibly can. Just like I once realized that life of a chicken is more important than my self-serving culinary interests, I also believe that my enjoyment of a perfect Haas avocado from Mexico is not as important to me as the effects my shopping habits have on the planet and its creatures.

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?