One year, a couple was inspired to try to eat locally for a year. They defined locally based on their geographic surroundings and ended up drawing a boundary that allowed them to eat food withing 100 miles of their home in Vancouver, BC.

This book is the story of the challenges they faced and the lessons they learned. A year of trying to eat only locally grown and produced foods was difficult. Some of these difficulties were due to their geographic location; the area around Vancouver is just not fit for producing sugar or citrus. Other difficulties were more humorous; their 100 mile area included parts of northern Washington. They visited and found that the area produced a variety of wonderful foods, but then realized that they would be hampered by restrictions on taking food over the border (they decided it was worth the risk to smuggle home a wheel of cheese).

One of the most important lessons that the authors learned about food is that you can grow a lot more than you think in the climate of the Pacific Northwest. Our stereotypes about what can grow well are extremely warped by where things can be grown with the absolute highest yield. However, in reality most climates can support a much larger variety of food than they are known for, albeit at a smaller scale. Thus, even eating locally in Vancouver, BC, the authors were able to have a varied and interesting diet all year round (although it did take some preserving and finding wheat was a pain).

The other lesson the authors learned was to appreciate their food more. Spending a year eating locally caused Smith and Mackinnon to really think about the food they ate and helped them to appreciate the simple joys of fresh fruit or the first greens of the season. They learned, emotionally not just intellectually, that our food connects us to the earth and that holds true whether the food comes from your windowsill, a small farmer, or a giant farm.

The main thing I have taken from the book is to just think about my food, where it comes from, and what its production method may be denying me. I am not going to start only eating food that comes from within 100 miles, but I am going to take distance into account when given the choice. I am not going to stop buying lemons, but I am going to acknowledge that a strawberry shipped from California is less tasty than one picked fresh and ripe in Marysville. Mainly, I am going to acknowledge that our food production system is not without real social and environmental cost and try to take that cost into account when I am looking at price differences. ( )

Good look at just what's possible within 100 miles, and what surprisingly isn't. ( )

Quick read about a couple from Vancouver, B.C. who decide to conduct a one-year experiment in local eating. They draw their boundaries with a 100-mile radius of Vancouver and there their adventures begin.

Similar in themes to Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, this book is neither so broad in scope (in terms of increasing the reader's knowledge of industrial food systems) nor narrow in menus - they didn't talk toooo much about what they ate on a daily basis, which I for one missed. I really would have liked to have heard more about their day-to-day diets. Instead you get a look into how the experiment affected their lives as a couple - kind of interesting tangentially, but not what I was really after as a whole.

Great read though! I love memoirs, and this one combined that with my zest for local-ism, so I am inspired all over again to eat out of my big back yard. ( )

Blech,

I wouldn't call anything that happened to these people "raucous," and they did try to hard to pull too many threads into one book (food politics! environmentalism! family history! cooking tips! relationship troubles!), but this was enjoyable. I am thinking about local food in a different way--that it's a cultural need as well as an environmental need--and I think that's a valuable takeaway. ( )