51. The 100-Mile Diet
Team Clam (that’s a couples nickname for Chloe and Cam; like Bennifer or Kimye) is going on a diet this month. Not for our waistlines. In fact, the winter weight has mostly sloughed off for me as I toil in this SW Virginia June sun. No, this diet has nothing to do with body fat, but more to do with geography. We’re challenging ourselves to the 100-Mile Diet this July.
The idea is simple: we’re going to put as much emphasis on homegrown and locally produced food as we possibly can. We’re not being particularly dogmatic or nit-picky about it. We’re not going to go without salt, for instance, because that would make for a lot of gross and boring meals. We’ll drink coffee and tea that’s sustainably sourced and locally roasted and blended. We’ll support the small businesses of friends and neighbors who cook and preserve food like breads, flours, cheese and nut butters because a big motivation for this stunt is to reinforce the role of microeconomy in our lives. And regional beers only. Our definition of local for this endeavor is a 100 mile radius from Roanoke, and if we manage to do any sort of travel this month, our radius travels with us.
We’re in a pretty privileged situation, of course, by dint of my being a mixed market vegetable farmer. Our farmers market will be brimming with variety and we picked July because it’s bound to be more bountiful than February. It really shouldn’t be that hard when berries, peaches, summer squash are rounding into form, but I have a feeling we’ll be training our minds to think about our grub in a different way all month. I’m a habitual snacker and a devout second-breakfast enthusiast, and just two days in, it’s taken a little bit of creativity to fill all those calories. I ate way too much bread yesterday and it didn’t feel great.
We aren’t the first humans to be eating a local diet, obviously. It’s kind of funny how off-the-wall this diet challenge seems when you consider our evolution from hunter-gatherer peoples. Our ancestors 15,000 years ago weren’t importing transatlantic foodstuffs. And more recently, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon re-popularized the concept of the 100 Mile Diet with their blog series and subsequent book by that title. This week marks the 15 year anniversary of their series in The Tyee, and they’re reflecting on it this week at TheTyee.ca.
My plan is to write short blogs here as it strikes me throughout the month; just sharing a little stream of consciousness and local food porn. We’re still looking for sources of rice, dry beans, and oats. I know they can be grown here but I don’t know anybody doing it on a serious scale. So please feel free to shoot me an email or a direct message with your favorite farm-to-fork businesses we can check out!