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May 3rd, 2006 By Mia Stainsby (Vancouver Sun) ALISA Smith and James MacKinnon started a project dedicated to eating food only grown and produced within a 100-mile (150-km) radius of their Kitsilano apartment. They keep a community garden plot near their Kits home. Last Christmas I received a book I couldn't put down. Julie and Julia had begun as a blog and morphed into a book, propelled by fan devotion. Author Julie Powell, a New York City secretary, felt trapped in a metaphysical rut the size of Manhattan and took on a deranged project to save her soul. Her plan: She would cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking in 365 days in her cramped NYC kitchen. The book turned into a huge bestseller because of the Bridget Jonesy way she spun her tale. Well, darned if there isn't a parallel universe kind of thing right here in Vancouver. Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon's deranged project involved this: For 365 days, eat only foods and beverages produced within a 100-mile radius of their walk-up apartment in Kitsilano. They dubbed it the 100-Mile Diet. "We were ignorant," they say, looking back at how unprepared they were. They wrote of their pioneering adventure on the online newspaper The Tyee (www.thetyee.ca) and now book publishers have come a-calling. Two of them, in fact. The couple also just launched www.100milediet.org, an online guide for local eating. It certainly helps that the two freelance writers know how to craft a compelling, relevant story without preaching or darkening our minds with guilt. Their book, with the working title The 100-Mile Diet, will be out in the spring of 2007. Like Julie, the couple felt trapped in a rut, only it was a global one and their therapy was planetary: Eat locally from small producers. It would lessen environmental impact and help the local farming economy. "For the average American meal (and we assumed the average Canadian meal is similar), World Watch reports that the ingredients typically travel between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres, a 25 per cent increase from 1980," they wrote in their online column. "This average meal uses up to 17 times more petroleum products and increases carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount, compared to an entirely local meal." Adds Smith: "Even if something is grown here, sometimes it's trucked to Ontario, preserved and packaged there and trucked back. Regionally sourced food uses 17 times less fuel than nationally sourced." You might think the 100-Mile Diet might be easy enough, but remember, it doesn't include the contents of a Safeway store a few blocks from their home. Nor did it include anything made with wheat as they couldn't find any that was locally grown. "Immediately, an unexpected ethical question loomed: What the hell are we going to eat for breakfast?" MacKinnon says. Friends responded: "Eggs, you idiots!" But even organic eggs were a no-no until they found ones at UBC hatched by chickens that ate local grub themselves. And hallelujah! They eventually tracked down a baker on Vancouver Island who grew his own wheat and milled it. Tofu was out since the vegetarian couple realized no soybeans are grown locally. Rice, olive oil, chocolate, salt and sugar were out too. The list of banned foods seemed awfully long and the list of edibles very short at the beginning, when even local lettuce was nowhere to be found. "It always involved large piles of potatoes," Smith says of the first few weeks of meals. Early spring was a bad time to start such a radical diet. After six weeks, MacKinnon lost seven pounds and Smith 10 pounds. "James' jeans hung down his butt like a skater boy," Smith wrote in the blog. "He told me he had no butt left at all." Laughing in their sun-filled Kitsilano apartment, she says: "It seemed like we could eat as many potatoes as we wanted and still lose weight. Neither of us are terribly large people to begin with, so that alarmed us," says Smith. "But we were on it for political reasons. It made it a lot easier," MacKinnon adds. Their first fresh salad consisted of chickweed, dandelion greens and anise from their community garden plot. But when the East Van Farmers' Market opened, they ate royally. "Everything was picked within 24 hours and there was so much flavour," says Smith. On the same day they found a baker who agreed to sell them some of his home-grown wheat flour, as luck would have it, they found a "beautiful second-hand 1950s chrome Italian pasta machine." (There were no fresh or dried pasta noodles made with local wheat to be found.) In their living room, there are three white plastic buckets lined up like temple gods. They're filled with local flour, which they have a newfound respect for. There's dried chili in the hallway closet and stored onions in a bedroom cupboard. "We made a few sacrifices in decor," Smith admits. "Homemade pasta noodles made with local flour are amazingly tasty," MacKinnon says. "It was a lucky discovery. It's a thousand times better than dried pasta. And the flour makes the best pancakes ever." (They go especially well with the maple syrup from Vancouver Island they discovered.) Along the way, they learned how to bake sourdough bread (as it doesn't require commercial yeast) and crackers, and they make cheese and tea with sage they grew on their balcony. They loosened their vegetarian lifestyle and even bought local organic beef at the farmers' market and made stew. "Very good. Very tasty," they say when asked how they liked it. As well, they ate seafood and shellfish, carefully researching where it was harvested. "We'd like to have caught the salmon ourselves but it was really difficult with closures at the time. All of a sudden we were faced with very important issues like habitat loss, development on agricultural land," Smith says. They weaned themselves from Mexican strawberries and tropical fruits like bananas and learned not to miss them. But then they discovered the best-tasting cantaloupes from Saltspring Island and the UBC Farm, plus honey and walnuts in Langley; the couple canned, froze and jammed through the summer. (They froze way too much corn and not enough tomato sauce.) Smith, who'd never been to a farm before, picked berries by the bucket loads and went in search of food to put away for the winter. "It was a process of re-engagement with other people, with ingredients -- they all connect," MacKinnon says. "Disengagement makes us blind to everything going on." "There was clearly a pre-existing groundswell of support for local eating," Smith says. "It seems it wants to be a movement. We're at the beginning of a movement. People came out of the woodwork from all over the world. Hundreds have gotten in touch with us, saying 'Right on!' or wanting to try it or wanting reprints. It became like a part-time job." Grass-roots groups launched their own 100-Mile Diet, Utne magazine and the BBC came calling and suddenly, a movement was born. The couple sees great hope with consumer support. "It can totally reshape the food system," he says. "It happened with organics and I feel confident this, too, will hit the mainstream." Asked to cite moments of desperation or temper tantrums during the 100-Mile Diet, Smith remembers staying up all night blanching, scraping and freezing 150 cobs of corn. "My mom told me they should be done right away or they'd lose their flavour." They recall a meal that MacKinnon concocted early in the 100-Mile Diet. "It was a mixture of goo," he starts, "of boiled spinach, mustard greens, squash, fava beans." Smith interjects supportively. "It sounds weird. It looked hilarious and striped, but I could imagine it done perfectly in a mould in some fancy restaurant." "The turnip sandwich was one of my more innovative dishes," MacKinnon quips. He used turnips as the "bread" before they were rescued by the local wheat grower. Their stubborn determination isn't at all surprising. Smith, for instance, hiked alone in the Arctic. "I never thought about polar bears until I got there. Then I was aware of this thin piece of nylon between me and whatever was out there. I continued on anyway," she says, and was rewarded with an amazing journey through extraordinary landscape and meeting equally extraordinary Inuit people. They do have a weakness for fossil-fuelled travel, however. MacKinnon has been travelling the world the past 10 years for his writing. He recently returned from Malawi, Africa where he was working on a book for Amnesty International. But when they're in the city, they use their car only for six months of the year, for summer getaways. They have a cabin in northern B.C. and found a cornucopia at the local farmers' market during their summer visit. They can't imagine going back to the way they ate. "I don't miss bananas in the slightest," says MacKinnon. They have dropped to eating 90 per cent local ingredients but don't expect to fall below 75 per cent. Even their friends are coming around. One switched from orange juice from Florida to apple juice from the Okanagan for his morning beverage. Others have tried the 100-Mile Diet for a shorter periods. On the day I interviewed the healthy and robust-looking couple, they had breakfasted on toast with crabapple jelly and honey, eggs and sage tea. "I have the feeling lunch is going to involve corn," says MacKinnon. "For dinner, I discovered some tomato sauce in the freezer. I'll probably make pasta." Now you might wonder if they cheated at all. Truth be told, they did. On one item -- salt. The body needs it, especially when cycling and rock climbing. Their closest source for salt was Oregon and they supplemented it with local dried seaweeds which contain salt, putting it in soups and other dishes. But they're planning on a kind of restitution by going to Bamfield to try to make salt by evaporating clean sea water. "It's our last symbolic gesture to close the diet," says MacKinnon.

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