Sunday, April 1, 2012

0 to 100 in 365 days

The 100-Mile Diet

By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon


Published in 2007 by Vintage Canada from Toronto

Today's Assigned Reading: The entire book



Well, up until this point we've been reading chapters or excerpts from various texts and books… but never the entire book. I wonder if this is meant to be some sort of treat or reward for having gotten this far in the course…. we get to read an entire book! Yay! Or maybe not =D


Ok, on to the serious stuff.


At only about 250 pages, double-spaced and with a fairly large font The 100-Mile Diet was a quick enough read, taking me only about four days to finish. It also helped, I think, that the book was written by professional writers, not scientists or people of academia. That is to say, this book was written for the general public to easily pick up and enjoy… not for hapless university students upon whom it might be forced as part of a course's required reading (such as Guns, Germs and Steel… I only know of one person who willingly read that book).

Because The 100-Mile Diet was written by writers and was quite simply a narrative of their experiences in eating locally, I found it to be quite enjoyable and easily relatable. I especially liked the beginning - the authors start by explaining the facts and experience that caused them to even think about only eating food from within 100 miles of their home in downtown Vancouver. After that, the book tells of their adventures (and misadventures) in doing this for one year.


The book is organized by month and each is prefaced by a seasonal 100-mile recipe. In each month the two authors alternate voices and tell of the foods available, what they were eating and how they prepared it. In most chapters they also included notable food-related stories and major events in their lives. By revealing their personal thoughts regarding the difficulty of sticking the 100-mile diet (in the early part (p37-39) and living with each other (later on in the fall (p153)), we see them as real people, not saints who are above the problems of use average plebs.


Because of this sense of reality that they give to their adventures, we see how at the end of the year they enjoyed the experience and why they continued - even after the year was up - to eat locally. That is to say, they continued to eat locally because they felt better, both in body and in mind, and because by eating locally they felt happiness come from the simple act of eating (which we all must do every day…). Who wouldn't want to sit down at every mean and think yum and hurray?


Overall I quite enjoyed the book. I have to say, my favourite part was how the two authors were Canadian and lived in Vancouver. As a result I knew the places and the farms where they went (eg Reifal Bird Sanctuary (p52), Salt Spring Island (p90), English Bay (p220)) and could follow in my mind better than if it had taken place in say Toronto or New York. I greatly enjoyed that aspect of the book — in a sense the book itself was local!


I also really enjoyed reading about all the heirloom varieties of crops that they were eating, such as Red Fife wheat (p61) and the great many beans on p95… Rojo de Seda, Black Coco, Cannellini, Cheetah, Leopard, Ruckle and Orca (which is also known as Calypso and comes up later in the book). I know these varieties and have grown a great many of them in my garden!


But… as was suggested in this book, these species are but imports from the rest of the world (93); there is very little native growing in the Pacific North-West. So in a sense their 100 mile diet was still not really local and was based upon plants whose seeds — in some way or another - were not originally from the 200-mile circle that they ascribed to. It would be really interesting in my opinion to try eating 100% off the land for a year — just to see if it was possible!


Finally I just want to mention how horrified I was regarding their discussion on the decline of the natural environment (p135-144)… especially their point that as we cannot remember what it once was like, we do not know what we've lost and thus are OK with the present state (p144).


This idea reminds me very much about a book I read a while ago entitled The Forever War, a rough analogy of the Vietnam War. Basically, in the year 1996 an inter-stellar war begins and Earth's best and brightest are conscripted to become soldiers in a war no one really understands. The novel follows the story of William Mandella - who is conscripted in 1996 but still around 1500 years later (at the end of the war). Due to time dilation he only aged about eight years.


My point is that after those 1500 years, Mandella - a person from our time - has essentially become an alien from a completely different planet because the people, society and Earth had changed so much (and not exactly for the better). As the story progresses, you see that the sheep-like people of the year 3500 are OK with those changes because they've never known anything else. But because Mandella remembers what Earth used to be like, he is discontent with the current state of affairs and ends up being exiled across time and space.


To think that I may be one of those sheep because I've never questioned what the world used to be like is disconcerting as hell! And I don't suppose I'll ever really know what the world used to be like - the ocean full of jellyfish (p137-138), the rivers packed with fish (p138-139), and the forests full of wildlife, birds, and hundreds of plants (140-141).



But enough of the doom-and-gloom. It's warm out, I'm caught up on school work and it's time to plant the garden.