Local food by Katherine Dedyna

Buying only local food is harder than it looks

Katherine Dedyna
Victoria Times Colonist
Saturday, December 08, 2007
The 100-Mile Diet has chomped its way into 21st-century vocabulary. Popularized by B.C. bestselling authors Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, the phrase has attracted nearly two million Google hits so far. That's a lot of interest in eating locally. In fact, "locavore" is the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2007 word of the year.
So what is the 100-Mile Diet? It's a response to the fact that most ingredients in the average North American meal have travelled at least 1,500 miles to get to the table. In contrast, Smith and MacKinnon decided to consume only food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver.
That was in 2005. Their plan resulted in a best-selling book and a website that has had more than 13,000 people worldwide sign up, including many Vancouverites and Vancouver Islanders.
"B.C. and the Island are hotbeds for the 100-Mile Diet mainly because there was so much coverage of it here," MacKinnon said in an e-mail. There's another reason: "Dozens of people have been laying the groundwork of a solid and deep-rooted local foods movement in this part of the world for years."
Über-environmentalist David Suzuki says local eating "may be one of the most important ways we save ourselves and our planet."
That's because of the cost in fuel, global warming and imperilled food security inherent in shipping dinner from the other side of the world.
So how about a Vancouver Island Diet? Consider a few facts:
"The biggest thing we raise on this Island - the No. 1 crop on usable farmland - is hay," said Dr. Bill Code, president of the 200-member Island Farmers Alliance. That 25,000 hectares of forage takes up far more arable land than any form of food meant for people, here in the the mildest climate in Canada.
"I think that's a tremendous waste of the tremendous land and opportunity we have here," Code added.
He and his wife eat about 90 per cent locally. But they're not the norm. And even dedicated local food enthusiasts acknowledge that global economies and an appetite for international foods have translated into the ultimate irony: It takes more time, money, effort and commitment to find and eat what farmers a few kilometres away have raised.
"We need to look at a 'Buy on the Island' campaign because of the crisis," Code said.
What crisis?
B.C. raises about 48 per cent of its food but the Island is down to just six per cent, he says. Some of that is due to population growth: the Island population has tripled in the last 50 years to nearly 800,000.
"Vancouver Island used to grow everything," laments Tom Henry, editor of Small Farm Canada and a Metchosin farmer. "What happened is almost every foodstuff began to be produced by larger and larger farms and smaller producers went out of business."
But there is hope. "Thanks in large part to the local food movement, there's a rising interest in accessing local foods. There's enough of a niche," he says.
That three per cent niche isn't much, he says, but it's enough to sustain farming and, in turn, some food security - the ability to feed ourselves without depending on ferries or air freight.
There is no way Island farmers could feed us now: "If everybody within the CRD decided to go with a 100-Mile Diet, there would not be enough food," said Sushil Saini, a Saanich resident working on a PhD at the University of Victoria's school of environmental studies.
© Victoria Times Colonist 2007