More than Plenty

I recently checked out a book from the library by the originators of the "100-mile diet." It's called Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon. I'd heard about the 100-mile diet before. Occasionally when I describe macrobiotics as emphasizing eating locally people will ask if it's this. (It's not.) Macrobiotics encourages eating locally because you receive the energy of the local where you live. This means you're more likely to adjust to the proper temperatures of your locale because you're eating what was grown there in that temperature. Similarly to the issue of eating local honey because of the allergy immunity it provides, eating locally provides an energetic, yin-yang type connection to your earth. The creators of the 100-mile diet started it for the ecological reason of their dinner's carbon footprint. Even being vegetarians (that boasted of 59 cent meals when vegetables are cheap and plentiful) their average dinner traveled almost 1,500 miles. This is an interesting statistic and one that we should all be aware of. As Michael Pollan mentions in The Omnivore's Dilemma, is it better to eat locally or organic? These two are erring on the side of local.

Yet it's created some problems that luckily we would not face here in California. They have no oil and must rely on butter. They have no grains, since rice nor wheat grow near Vancouver. They have branched out of their vegetarian diet to become quite adventurous omnivores (oysters?!) all for the sake of having enough protein to continue biking around their rainy (though lovely) city. I never truly appreciated how much we benefit from being in the heart of California's bread basket of agriculture. I mean, I knew about the strawberries because I've been eating them non-stop since they showed up at the farmer's market several weeks ago. But olive oil, almonds, beans, and grains- I could not eat a macrobiotic diet without these staples.

That's why in the end the 100-mile diet will never work for me. Macrobiotics encourages you to eat your vegetables and fruits locally. Your beans from a 500 mile radius. Your grains from your continent and your seaweed from your nearest ocean. At least then I will not be eating apples from New Zealand (in the middle of the summer no less!) nor tropical fruit in the middle of a Minnesota winter. Which begs the question that gets asked of both macros and 100-milers, how can you do this in a typical Northern winter climate? Most people would say it's not possible. I think the authors would agree with me that you just have to plan ahead. Imagine your grandparents, or if not them maybe your great-grandparents. How did they survive winters before there were frozen TV dinners and microwaves? They canned fruits and vegetables. They pickled things. They stored roots in a root cellar. They froze things that could be frozen. So don't tell me it can't be done. It can be. It has been. And if our great-grandparents could do it before there were microwaves you can damn well bet that we could do it now.