Vicki Robin and the 10-mile Diet

I recently came across Vicki Robin's blog on her 10-Mile Diet. Her CSA farmer challenged her to eat for one month (September) on what she was getting from her share. Vicki decided to allow any other suppliers within the 10-mile radius, as well as foods from her own garden. She made exceptions for salt, oil, coffee/tea, spices, and lemons. (I made similar exceptions.)

It is fascinating reading.

Friends

Deciding to eat within such a small area means that she knows personally everyone who produces her food. A tomato, a beet, a bunch of greens, a wedge of goat cheese: everything has a name attached to it, a person she has talked to, oftentimes a friend or someone who quickly becomes a friend. Barter becomes an important part of acquiring a varied diet.

She knows that the food she is eating was not created in a factory somewhere, or shipped from China, or picked by underpaid and probably illegal farm workers. (By the way, people who complain about the high cost of fruits and vegetables should consider that most of the workers in these crops are Mexican nationals, poorly paid, ill-treated in many cases, working 14-hour days in the sun and dust. If immigration laws are strictly enforced due to public pressure, produce prices will skyrocket and availability will drop precipitously. So be careful what you wish for.)

Seasonality

A 10-mile diet means eating what grows in her area, in season. She lives on an island in Washington State, with a mild and fairly benevolent climate. The foods are fresh, often picked days or even hours before being eaten. They are at the peak of their flavor and nutrition.

Ingenuity is required to deal with a surfeit of zucchini or other vegetable. (The rule on zucchini: either too many or too few. I unwisely planted TWO hills of zucchini; one would have provided enough for us and the neighbors with some extras for the chickens.)

Intensive vs. Extensive Agriculture

Extensive agriculture is what we usually think of these days: vast monoculture fields, very few workers, a full load of herbicides, insecticides, GMO crops, artificial fertilizers, huge and expensive farm equipment, and loads of diesel to power it. And you can think of 100,000 cattle in a feedlot, eating the subsidized commodities that are making them sick (and us sick as well), turning fertilizer into a massive disposal problem. Extensive agriculture is highly capital-intensive: expensive equipment, expensive chemicals, expensive fuels.

Intensive farming is agriculture on a human scale: small farms, plots, even pocket gardens. It requires lots of work and attention from people, and is thereby labor-intensive. This is the way farming has been conducted for 10,000 years, up until the 20th century. Many small growers are organic: they get a higher return for their produce, in return for more attention and care for their crops and the soil. The yield, counted per acre or per dollar or per-anything-else except hours of labor, is much higher than for extensive farming.

In the U.S. these days, extensive agriculture produces dry beans, feedlot and CAFO meat, and grains and all the multitude of industrial food products created from them. If you are eating locally, especially hyperlocally like Vicki, these foods are pretty much out of the question. Your choices come from the intensively-farmed items: fruit, veg, backyard eggs and chickens, hobby honey, the occasional grassfed steer, someone's pet dairy cow.

Vicki found that she was losing weight (good), and that she was REALLY missing grains, crackers, breads, and such foods (painful).
If Jim and I had stayed strict on our 100-mile diet here in Colorado, we would have had to make the same choices as we ran out of stock on hand. As the first year elapsed, we had expanded our range for staples (grains, etc.) to the western U.S. I did enough meal planning inside the 100-mile circle to gain some new insights about how dependent the standard American diet is on cheap petroleum and other resources. We kept the rules in place for fruits and vegetables, meat, dairy, and eggs (backyard eggs are the best!).

Gratitude

When everything on the table came from her neighborhood, grown or created by people she knows (or by herself), Vicki found that she gained a much greater appreciation for the work involved to put that food on her table. The goat cheese, the onions, the chard, were little treasures, their full costs appreciated. And the essential gift nature of food becomes visible again. We don't MAKE food; at best we make it possible for God/Mother Nature/the soil and all its denizens to give it to us.