Is eating local food better for you? (AP Photo/Don Ryan)The 100-mile diet is a noble idea — eat only foods produced within 100 miles of your home. But is it really practical for urban dwellers?
That was the question asked by writer Susan Cosier, a New Yorker who tried the 100-mile diet and wrote about it in last month’s E/The Environmental Magazine. She found that buying local often is easier said than done. Diet staples like coffee and tea aren’t grown locally. She learned her grocery store buys produce from a distributor that carries goods from all over the world — pineapples from the Philippines, avocados from California and garlic, surprisingly, from China.
There’s no scientific evidence that eating locally-farmed food is better for you. But it does give you the sense that you have more control over what you put into your body. Eating local often means you can meet the people who produce your food because they are selling it themselves at the local farmers’ market. You can ask questions about pesticide use and farming methods, and sometimes you may even be able to visit the farm or dairy where your food is grown or raised.
Most people who follow the 100-mile diet do so because they like fresh food and because they want to help the planet. Buying locally means less fuel burned to transport food, which means less pollution. Local farmers often are organic producers who employ earth-friendly farming methods or raise free-range animals. Recently, the concept of the 100-mile diet has gained attention after the release in April of the book “Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally.” The book chronicles the efforts of authors James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith to eat foods produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver apartment.
“Although I was inspired by these conscientious consumers, just deciding what I would eat for breakfast made me nervous,” wrote Ms. Cosier. “I prepared menus and talked to people who had tried the diet themselves, but since my success depended on my locale, out-of-towners’ advice wasn’t very helpful.”
Local vegetables were easy enough to find at a farmers’ market. But the nearby organic market where she shopped no longer carried local dairy products. Surprisingly, she found local milk and butter at Whole Foods, whose Web site says the chain is “permanently committed” to buying local foods that meet its standards. At Whole Foods, signs above the food state its origin, but Ms. Cosier notes that most grocery stores don’t make it easy to find out where their products come from.
Being 100 percent loyal to the 100-mile diet meant tough choices. While cooking her bounty of vegetables purchased at the farmers’ market, Ms. Cosier had to decide whether to add brown sugar and cooking sherry that weren’t local. “I debated…and decided to use them anyway,” she wrote. “What good is any diet without a little wiggle room?”
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