Hundred Mile Diet

Here's a cross-posting of the Food For Thought article I wrote this week for our CSA ezine. The article deals with the fascinating idea of the Hundred Mile Diet, and at the bottom, I have appended the farm-by-farm, mile-by-mile results I found when I went looking for local staples within 100 miles of my house.

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Food For Thought: The Hundred Mile Diet

What if you had to get all your food locally? Could you get by?

Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon provided a fascinating glimpse into this world of local-food-or-bust when they gave themselves a challenge: the Hundred Mile Diet. For one year, they promised, they would eat nothing that they could not find within a hundred mile radius of their home.

When a friend sent me a link to their first article, I was hooked. Could they do it? Would such a thing be feasible for them? For me?

Their experience is now a book, a website, and a phenomenon: hundreds of others have signed on for their own versions of the Hundred Mile Diet. (Check out their website for some great local eating tips!) Just reading their first article ot me reading the food labels in my local supermarket: where did my food come from? I started shopping more and more at local farmers markets, and asking the vendors there where their farms were, and whether all their produce was local, and just where was this fish caught, anyway?

I also started thinking: if higher oil and gas prices would eventually necessitate a change in how food was shipped across the country (and the world!), what would that mean for my family? Being able to buy all our food locally might mean anything from lower prices to food security. Would moving to a Hundred Mile Diet now help guarantee that the small local farms and their food variety would be there when we needed them?

In case anyone is curious, the Local Harvest website lists 437 farms within 100 miles of my Silver Spring, Maryland zip code. Using their farm products search engine to search for food needs beyond just fruits, vegetables, meats, and milk (all of which I already knew I could get locally), I found whole wheat flour, wheat, corn, oats, dry beans, walnuts, pecans, peanuts, honey, maple syrup, and vinegar within the 100 mile limit. (I list specific farms and distances below for anyone who's interested.) For pressed oil, I would have to travel 120 miles, and for rice, 150 miles. And although the search engine did not list white sugar at all, I found out that I could get brown sugar and molassas locally processed (if not locally grown) in Silver Spring itself!

We live in an area of unusual bounty. What can we do to keep it that way? This is the question that continues to float at the back of my mind as I begin to bring my family slowly closer to the Hundred Mile Diet. I may never arrive there, but I am finding the journey itself fruitful - and delicious!

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• flour (whole wheat): Moutoux Orchard, Purcellville, VA, 52 miles
• wheat: SC Burton Farms, Glen Arm, MD, 52 miles
• rice: The Gardens, Prince George, VA, 151 miles
• oats: Lands End Farm, Chestertown, MD, 75 miles
• walnuts: Arcadia Farm, Chestertown, MD, 75 miles
• pecans: Canning Farm, Dogue, VA, 83 miles
• peanuts: Whipple Farm, Rixeyville, VA, 68 miles
• pressed oil: Strattons Wynnorr Farm, Westtown, PA, 118 miles
• vinegar: Dragonfly Farms, Mount Airy, MD, 46 miles
• dry beans: Virginia Green Grocer and the Virginia Organic Co-operative, Warrenton, VA, 54 miles
• honey: NakedBee Apiaries, Laytonsville, MD, 18 miles
• brown sugar, molassas (processed locally; probably not grown locally): Panela Sweet Cane, Silver Spring, MD, 0 miles