The 100 Mile Diet

Week: 18

Pounds Lost: 34

Okay, it’s probably not what you think, but since this is a chronicle of my weight-loss journey, I thought I’d include this little tidbit that I’ve been chewing on for the past few days. Okay, bad food-related puns aside, you probably haven’t heard of the 100 mile diet. No, it’s not a way to lose weight by walking/running a hundred miles – in fact, it’s really got nothing to do with losing weight. No, this little number’s only interested in the minor goal of saving the planet.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking…how can a diet save the planet? Eradicating obesity worldwide would certainly benefit humanity, but save the planet…no. Well, it’s elegantly simple, actually; here’s how it works:

You only eat foods that were grown and produced within 100 miles (that’s 160.9344 kms for the whole world except the US and UK) of your home.

All right, you say…so what? How does that help the planet? Huh? Well, here’s the rationale:

When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles—what Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon (Vancouver-based journalists and creators of the 100 mile diet) call "the SUV diet." Wow, you say, 1,500 miles (2414.016 kms) that’s a long way. So? Well, consider what the Sierra Club of Canada has to say about what’s known as "food miles":

The long-range transport of food has a significant impact on climate
change and the amount of air pollutants released into the atmosphere. In Canada
alone, the transportation sector accounts for one quarter of Canada’s greenhouse
gas emissions.[1] It has been estimated that the CO2 emissions attributable to
producing, processing, packaging and distributing the food consumed by a family
of four is about eight tonnes a year.[2]

Wow, the one tonne challenge suddenly got a lot easier, didn’t it?

Anyway, hubster and I were listening to a podcast this weekend about food miles, and we decided we needed to try to cut the cost of our family’s food miles. But what to do? We knew we weren’t ready to tuck into the 100-mile diet whole hog (so to speak); for one thing, it’s September in the prairies…what would we eat until the farmer’s markets open up again next summer? Plain wheat? Secondly, I don’t think I could live without avocados. Seriously.

Anyway, the focus of the podcast was more on the issue of the true cost of meat (specifically beef: did you know that one of the leading sources of methane in the earth’s atmosphere is cow farts?) and how much less energy it takes to produce sufficient food to nourish the world’s vegetarians vs. us carnivores. So, I challenged Mr. Meat & Potatoes to go veg once a week. Note: I tried this once a few years ago when I went veg for a full 6 months, and Mr. M&P told me that he still feels hungry if there’s no meat in his meal and therefore refused. Now, WW has changed the man and he willingly agreed, so last night we had our first vegetarian meal for dinner: sweet potatoes (cut like fries, seasoned, lightly oiled and roasted), caribbean spiced black beans and mango salsa (okay, mangoes are not local, I know, but I had some chunks left over in the freezer). WOW! It was delicious, nutritious, within our WW points allowance.

So, what’s the point of this story? Are we converting to vegetarianism? Well, not 100% because we both do still love meat and honestly, if we were to do the 100 mile diet seriously, beef would top the list of locally available food products. But we are more aware of where our food comes from and the true cost (to the planet) of getting it to us. This journey really has been about so much more than just shedding the extra pounds – it’s about a whole new way of looking at food; including where it came from and why that’s important.

Bon Appetit!