FEBRUARY 27 - We’ve heard from many of you outside Canada and the US that you, too, wished to find your 100-mile circle. Now you can! And to make it even easier, you don’t even need the postal or zip code. Just type in the place name, whether it be Hove, England, or Taipei, Taiwan. We’ll be updating the design soon, but try it out now in the Canada box.

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To get you thinking internationally, here’s a story from Rhiannon in Scotland (a place where some have scoffed at local eating, but we know better):

Based in a strong agricultural area of Scotland, we manage to eat a lot of local food by default. Plus we grow our own vegetables. This first arose as a reaction to living more than half an hour’s walk from the nearest supermarket and not having a car, but we’ve continued it since moving house and acquiring a vehicle because we’ve found that there are very few vegetables that taste anything like as good from the supermarket as from the garden.

We’ve been surprised by the number of things that we didn’t think we’d be able to grow that have nevertheless done very well: aubergines and chillies (in a greenhouse), and butternut squash. Next year we plan to try sweetcorn, and maybe plant an apple tree.

For those things that genuinely don’t grow round here (bananas, tea, citrus fruit, rice, sugar, chocolate), we try to buy fair trade products where possible. This means that the Third-World workers who grow the crops are paid a fair wage, i.e. enough to live on, unlike those who harvest the crops that go to make most supermarket products.

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