Assets and Liabilities

Each of us has assets and liabilities when it comes to implementing a 100-mile diet, or any other local diet. I'll brainstorm a little in this post. I'll mark where we fall with ****

Climate-----------
Gold Star: a mild climate to grow food nearly year round, enough rain or other water.
Silver Star: temperate climate, rain or irrigation water. ****
Challenges: harsh climate, northern plains, hot southern desert, drought.

You will have to work a lot harder in a harsh climate, both to grow food yourself, and to find local food others have grown. Northern climates should be able to offer local pastured livestock; most wheat in this country is grown in the Dakotas and Montana (the problem is getting the farmer to sell it to you).

Residence-------
Gold Star: Live on a farm or small acreage; preferably owned by you.
Silver Star: Own a house on a lot in city, suburbs, or near town. ****
Challenges: Live in an apartment. It is even more of a challenge if that apartment is in a large city.

But the challenge of city apartment living is not insurmountable. Alisa Smith and James McKinnon started their 100-mile diet, described in their book "Plenty", living in an apartment in Vancouver B.C., and made it work.

Some cities have public gardens that you can reserve a space in. Some apartments have balconies that you can put some potted plants on. Many cities are served by CSAs that truck their produce into the city for their customers. You'll have to dig around. If you live in a huge place like Chicago or New York City, you may have to make your circle a little bigger (maybe 200 miles) to get along. The Hudson Valley north of NYC, for example, does have a tremendous number of CSAs and organic farms.

Cooking Skills----
Gold star: Enjoy cooking, have had some experience, willing to learn new tricks. ****
Silver star: Haven't cooked much, too busy, don't know how.
Challenges: Don't cook, don't intend to learn, nobody in my family cooks or is interested.

If you don't cook, don't intend to learn, and nobody else in your household intends to learn, then the 100-mile diet is not for you. Maybe somebody else can figure out a solution for people in this situation.

If you fall in the Silver Star category, and are willing to work at it, you can do just fine. Get some good cookbooks, organize the work, for instance, by spending a few hours on the weekends cooking for the week, or figure out meals you can make from local ingredients without a lot of preparation time. Get together with a friend who DOES cook, and learn from him or her.

If you live in the mild climate, you won't need to put much food away; you can go with whatever's available. The harsher the winters, the more you need to learn to freeze, can, dry, and pickle summer produce to get along.

Budget-------
Gold Star: Sufficient income to buy better food, or believe that improved health is worth spending a little more. ****
Silver Star: Cost is some concern, but health and other concerns are also important, so we can cope with it.
Challenge: Just barely have enough to buy the cheapest food; reliant on food banks; live in a dormitory or institution.

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their take-home pay on food than any country in the world, and less than at any time since the founding of the Republic. The U.S. is hooked on cheap food, really cheap food. And what we get for that, is..... really cheap food. Cosmetically appealing, flavorless produce; prepared food with too much sugar, fat, salt, preservatives, chemicals, etc., meat from a broken CAFO system (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) which puts us at risk of E. coli and a multitude of food-borne diseases and recalls; it just goes on and on.

The topic of saving money with local eating is worth a post in itself, which I will try to write in the next few weeks. But for starters, most of us spend an unconscionable amount of money on fast food, junk food, fancy coffee drinks, sodas, vending machines, and prepared foods. Include with that restaurants or take-out several to many times per week. If you were to add up all that you spend on various sources of food (a GOOD EXERCISE, by the way), that would give you a fair baseline to compare for local eating.

When you buy local food, you are buying FOOD. Not packaging, not advertising, not long-distance transportation, not massive distribution chains. FOOD. The money goes directly or nearly directly to the farmers and producers. That pastured beef you buy from your neighbor costs a little more a pound, but you can be sure it is clean, safe, tasty, and raised without cruelty. Anyway, more on this topic later.

Those in dormitories or group living facilities probably can't do much more than appeal to the kitchens and cooks there to buy more local food.

Geography-------
Gold Star: Have an ocean coast in your 100-mile circle (seafood, salt, seaweeds, yum!); have a variety of ecozones in your circle
for example uplands, river bottom, sunny and shady areas.
Silver Star: Have suitable agricultural land, with or without large variations, in the area. This includes mountain plains, Midwest, southern US, Pacific Coast, New England, in the U.S. ****
Challenges: Live next to toxic waste dump, nuclear plant, coal-fired power plant; polluted air, water, and land. All I can say is: MOVE! That geography is not good for your health.

Given any reasonable geography within your 100 miles, it should not be a limiter.

Family concerns------
Gold Star: Every member of your family is interested, or at least willing to give it a try. ****
Silver Star: One or more family members are set in their ways, or have dietary restrictions of various types, or are "fussy eaters".
Challenges: Having heard about local eating from you or somebody else, at least one family member is dead set against it, and will try to thwart your plans.

It's certainly nice to have everybody on board. But you may be able to bribe those who are a little less willing with extra "exceptions", more than you might otherwise give. Any local food that you eat is better than eating none.

Dietary restrictions could be weight-loss diets, allergy restrictions, celiac disease (wheat/rye/barley intolerance), lactose intolerance (milk), kosher, vegetarian, vegan, or others.

Weight-loss diets can probably be worked with; after all you're eating NO junk food, NO fast food, NO sugary foods, etc. I lost six pounds in the first month, eating whatever I liked.

I have celiac disease, so on the one hand, I'm not used to a wheat-based diet (cereal, sandwiches, pasta, day after day), which is helpful since wheat is one of those hard things to find most places. On the other hand, the alternative flours that I used for gluten-free baking are all out of range. I need to work on it.

Lactose intolerance in the family would mean that person would not eat dairy products, which is fine, because they weren't eating them before.

Kosher food: you just have an extra complication in your supplies, which should not be insurmountable.

For vegetarians, those that eat eggs and dairy do have a challenge, since the grains and beans which are important in the vegetarian diet are hard to find, but I think it is not impossible. The soybean is a staple of the vegetarian diet, usually run through industrial processes, and will be hard to find outside the supermarkets. Once you find your soybeans, preparing them is tedious (such as soy milk or tofu) but not impossible.

Vegans are probably in the worst situation, in our present food situation, for local eating. The soybean concerns for vegetarians are even worse for vegans, since they have few other sources of protein. For Northern Colorado 100-milers, nuts are not grown commercially in this area (though sunflowers are), eliminating another valuable protein source. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I think you'd have to prepare yourself with extra research finding food sources in order to succeed.

Children, especially of the "picky eater" variety, can be a problem. You know your children best. Some children will respond to a challenge, and want to save the planet; it's gratifying to see how aware many young people are now. With other children, you will need to move very slowly, offering them better food choices but not pushing hard enough to build up resistance. You may end up for a time fixing extra food for the picky one. Eventually, if the rest of the family is eating and obviously enjoying the healthy foods, the picky one will come along.

Perhaps some family members will cheat behind your back: get that cola, candy bar, greaseburger, bag of potato chips. Nothing really to do about it. Just put the healthy foods on the table.
Again, you know your family situation best.

You could help bring reluctant family members on board with trips to the farms or farmers markets where you're buying the food. You can talk to the farmers, see the animals and maybe pet them, maybe even pet the vegetables as they sit out there in their home of dirt.

Some adults will respond well to facts and figures; negotiating skills may be required for some. You just have to play it by ear. My husband was initially a little reluctant, but willing to try it. After a month, he finds he really loves the foods we're eating now, much more flavorful and interesting than before.

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who have successfully coped with a variety of challenges, some I haven't thought of, and certainly many solutions I haven't thought of. I encourage you to share with us.