The idea behind the 100-mile diet is that the food a person consumes must come from within 100 miles of home, in an effort to reduce that person’s carbon footprint.

It started with James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith (of Vancouver, British Columbia), who conducted a one-year experiment to demonstrate that they could live entirely on food grown or produced within 100 miles of their apartment. They went beyond produce — meat and dairy products in their diet came from animals that were packaged locally, as well as ate local feed.

For MacKinnon and Smith, the experiment was a success: while they do not follow a strictly local diet — they try, but since the experiment’s end have allowed food from outside their 100-mile limit back into their diets — the practice has spread and has become known as a good approach for sustainable eating.

But while I like the idea of a local diet, I know that practitioners of the 100-mile diet rarely have opportunities to eat outside of their homes: even office cafeterias are off limits. A few restaurants have made the attempt. FoodConnect interviewed Peter Robertson, the chef of Vancouver’s Raincity Grill. Raincity is trying to locally souce all of the ingredients that it turns into fine dining, but Robertson estimates that they’ve only reached about 98 percent compliance, citing spice and oils as two categories of ingredients that simply aren’t produced locally.

Complete compliance to locally produced food can be expensive, and it’s a cost that some people choose to pay. But, so far, the expenses seem out of the range of businesses. Restaurants — especially those that wish to spice their foods in such a matter that customers keep coming back — still have some major hurdles to overcome.

And once we’ve made our kitchens more sustainable, whether at home or commercially, we’ve got plenty of other factors to think about. I don’t know how well my office could handle a local diet — I have no idea where my printer paper comes from, despite the store’s labels regarding recycled content. And a lot of the equipment I use, from computers down to my office chair are definitely not stamped “Made in America,” let alone “Made Down the Road.”

The 100 mile diet is a good experiment, and a good influence. It’s time to start looking at the next step, though. Is it possible to make locally produced food (and other products) affordable for both big businesses and small? And more importantly, from their point of view, will it be affordable to the point that owners will still turn a profit?

 

 

Photo by Ben