starting the 100 mile diet

The thought of eating nothing but what grows within 100 miles of my home in Wilmington, NC is something I have turned around in my head for quite awhile. Actually putting the local diet into practice would not be the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to connect the diet to people around me or the people reading this in a meaningful way. On many levels this local diet can be seen as another sign of privilege but could also be a sign of how much we have lost in our community and how our food consumption has become just another disconnection from reality. For me, this project isn’t about food snobbery but an act of finding my place in this area’s food web.

All that said, there need to be some guidelines to keep me on track and keep things from getting muddy.

The rules:

1 – Anything currently in the cupboards is fair game. No sense wasting what has already been purchased. This includes all the trillion spices we have sitting around as well as the bulk cases of items like pasta and canned tomatoes that were purchased at various times during the past few months. Is this cheating? No, because what is there to cheat on with this project if we’re just going to throw away good food because of an arbitrary start date of the local diet? Which brings us to rule two…

2 – Anything that is going to be thrown away or has already been thrown away is fair game. A central issue in a local diet is the wastefulness of transporting food (for processing and packaging or simply to get it to your plate). If a piece of food has traveled several thousand miles and is now on its way to the dumpster (or is already there) and it is still in edible condition, why not take advantage of the opportunity? Rule number two is all about foraging and scavenging. Rule number two is NOT about hitting up every free beer tasting or art show with heavy Hors’doeuvres.

3 – The 100 mile boundary can have some flexibility with regard to staples such as wheat. Locally milled flour may not necessarily be from local wheat, so ingredients should be followed to their source as long as they are not tremendously outside of the 100 mile zone.

4 – Food should be from sustainable, organic or humane farms whenever possible. Seeking out these particular farms or gardeners will serve to reinforce their growing decisions, and this is pretty much the only type of food I want to put in my body – food from a trusted source.

5 – The duration of the diet is open ended but should be at least a lifetime.

That about covers it. If something sounds weird, let me know.