Message Board  100 mile diet Tara 7/12/07 - 11:44 PM The 100 mile diet can help the environment and you! :) When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles?call it "the SUV diet." On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon (bios) chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since then, James and Alisa have gotten up-close-and-personal with issues ranging from the family-farm crisis to the environmental value of organic pears shipped across the globe. They've reconsidered vegetarianism and sunk their hands into community gardening. They've eaten a lot of potatoes. Their 100-Mile Diet struck a deeper chord than anyone could have predicted. Within weeks, reprints of their blog at thetyee.ca had appeared on sites across the internet. Then came the media, from BBC Worldwide to Utne magazine. Dozens of individuals and grassroots groups have since launched their own 100-Mile Diet adventures. The need now is clear: a locus where 100-milers can get the information they need to try their own lifestyle experiments, and to exchange ideas and develop campaigns. That locus will be here at 100MileDiet.org?turning an idea into a movement. http://100milediet.org/home/ Why eat locally http://100milediet.org/why-eat-local/ Find your 100 mile area http://100milediet.org/map/ you can also check for local markets at http://www.sustainabletable.com The 100-Mile Index provides a statistical snapshot of our world's globalized food system. The numbers are fascinating, troubling, funny and sometimes, just plain strange. Have a read and send them to a friend. Help grow this movement. * Minimum distance that North American produce typically travels from farm to plate, in miles: 1,500 * Number of Planet Earths' worth of resources that would be needed if every person worldwide lived like the average North American: 8 * Planets saved if all of those people ate locally: 1 * Ratio of minutes spent preparing food by English consumers who buy ready-made foods versus traditional home-cooking: 1:1 * Estimated number of plant species worldwide with edible parts: 30,000 * Number of species that currently provide 90 percent of the world's food: 20 * Share of each U.S. consumer food dollar that returned to the farmer in 1910, in cents: 40 * Share that returned to the farmer in 1997, in cents: 7 * Ratio of prisoners to farmers in the U.S. population: 5:2 * Percentage of fresh vegetables eaten in Hanoi, Vietnam, that are grown in the city: 80 * Percentage of all tomatoes in U.S. that are harvested while green : 80 * Major river dams constructed to irrigate California, now the world's number five agricultural producer: 1,200 * Number of years that Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon of Vancouver, Canada, ate only foods produced from within 100 miles of their home: 1 * Amount of potatoes, in pounds, that they bought for the winter: 100 * Days that that 100 pounds of potatoes would have fed a person in Ireland, on average, before the potato famine of 1845: 18 * Combined weight in pounds that Alisa and James lost on their 100-Mile Diet: 12 REFERENCES: Rich Pirog et al., �Food, Fuel and Freeways,� Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University, 2001), p. 1. Standard data estimate input into ecological footprint calculator, www.myfootprint.org As above, with change only to food estimate Brian Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 164 Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 287. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 287. Halweil, p. 45. Halweil, p. 45. US Census 2000, factfinder.census.gov Halweil, p. 94. Halweil, p. 161. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 3. California Department of Food and Agriculture, California Agriculture: Highlights 2005. Larry Zuckerman, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 30. Tara --- http://www.TaraBurner.com http://www.AffordableMineralMakeup.com http://www.OnlineGreenDirectory.com http://www.FloridaMobileWeddings.com