100-mile diet adventure

When James MacKinnon and his wife, Alisa Smith, began their culinary journey that would become known as the 100-Mile Diet, it seemed everyone had something different to say.

On the one hand, the pair was applauded by environmental guru David Suzuki upon release of the couple’s book, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, in 2007. On the other, celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain called them just plain crazy.

For a year, they chose to give up many types of convenience foods that are taken for granted, including sugar, Cheerios, olive oil, rice, Pizza Pops, beer and much more. In theory, MacKinnon and Smith’s concept was fairly straightforward — they would only eat foods that were produced or grown within 100 miles of their Vancouver apartment.

Their idea began innocently enough three years prior, MacKinnon recalls. It was fall and the couple was preparing to host a dinner party for some family and close friends at their remote cabin in northern British Columbia. But to their surprise, they had no food to feed their guests, with the exception of one slightly rotting cabbage sitting in the fridge. With no stores in the vicinity and no roads to lead them to one, MacKinnon and Smith faced the challenge head-on. The results yielded a beautifully put-together meal, with its ingredients found just steps outside their cabin’s door. After foraging, a bounty feast of char, dandelion greens, potatoes, apples and sour cherries was much enjoyed by all.

Shortly after coming home, MacKinnon and Smith immersed themselves in research, with the impression of their cabin meal still fresh in their minds. They were astounded by what they discovered. Statistics they found showed foods that make up the average North American diet typically travel between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from the farm to our plates.

“Each time we sat down to eat,” write MacKinnon and Smith in their book, “we were consuming products that had travelled the equivalent distance of a drive from Toronto, Ontario to Whitehouse, Yukon Territory or from New York City to Denver, Colorado. We were living on an SUV diet.”

The pair reasoned that there must be a more environmentally responsible way to eat, and that’s how their 2005 challenge began. More than five years later, there are still memories that resonate with them — from seeking the wisdom of grandmothers, to conversing with modern-day hunters and gathers, and getting passionate about a greater scale of subjects, from biodiversity to economics.

More encouragingly, the 100-Mile Diet is also an easy way to start thinking about eating local. The radius is large enough to reach beyond a big city and small enough to feel truly local, explain MacKinnon and Smith (and it is easier to say than The 160-Kilometre Diet, they joke). After living on the diet for a year as an experiment, they still use many of its teachings. Eating local for these two turned out to be a lifelong lesson in pleasures that are available to us all.

Q&A with Jason Mackinnon and Alisa Smith


LM: Are you still participating in the challenge today? If so, how is that going for you?

JM/AS: We did the 100-Mile Diet to learn everything we could about what it meant to eat totally locally. These days, we focus on local food wherever we are, even if we’re travelling, but we don’t worry if some non-local food slips in now and then. We’ve never argued that everyone should eat only local food, all the time, only that more of us should eat more local food, more often.

LM: On your website, you mention the necessity of balance and waving a “magic wand” at certain favourite foods that may be difficult to give up. What are your top three can’t-live-without foods?

JM/AS: We meet some people who say, “I can’t eat local food, because I’d have to give up coffee.” But local eating isn’t like vegetarianism — it’s not something you do or don’t do. Anyone can eat more local food and enjoy all the benefits of better flavour, better nutrition, and [a better] connection to the place that you live in.

About 90 per cent or more of what we eat is local food, but we have a few long-distance treats. Here’s [the] top three:

1. Chocolate — James never eats it, but Alisa loves the stuff

2. Beer — Alisa never drinks it, but James loves a cold beer, and while lots of microbrews are made locally, they’re not made with local ingredients

3. Olive oil — Useful, healthy, hard to replace

LM: Do you ever feel tempted to go back to your old eating habits? If so, how do you avoid that?

JM/AS: We can honestly say that, no, we never think about eating the way we did before the 100-Mile Diet. There are lots of reasons for that, but reason number one is that we are eating better-tasting, more interesting food than we ever have before. Who on earth would give that up?