The 100 Mile Diet and My "not-so-local" Breakfast

Eating locally is a real challenge, and some folks are taking it quite seriously.  Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon are the founders of the 100 Mile Diet, a movement they started back in 2005 in an effort to eat foods only found within 100 miles of their Vancouver home.  Their's is a fabulous website devoted to the concept, tailored to both American and Canadian households.

This morning as I sat down to write this week's post, I thought about the 100 Mile Diet while I ate my typical summer breakfast: a whole wheat bagel with hummus and a bowl of raspberries.  I also had a coffee earlier with hazelnut-flavoured coffee whitener stirred into it.  In terms of eating locally, I wonder, "Just how local is my breakfast? Does it fit within the 100 Mile Diet?"  Somehow I doubted it would.  I decided to break it down.

The 100 mile radius around my house.  At least I can still enjoy Niagara's wine.

The raspberries:  I'm doing well with the raspberries because they came from about 50 feet away, down at the back of my yard.  Growing food is one of the best ways to eat locally because you know exactly where the food is coming from, and what, if any, pesticides or herbicides have been used in the growing of that food.  If you're going at the 100 Mile Diet hard core, you'll also want to make sure that your seeds are sourced locally, or saved from your garden the year before.

The bagel: The brand is called Old Mill and I buy them because they're cheap.  The bag tells me that these bagels are distributed by Weston Bakeries, which is located in Toronto.  That seems decent, but the word "distributed" is what gets me.  Trying to figure out if my bagel was actually baked anywhere near my home is difficult.  All I can determine from the company's website is that "Weston Foods is primarily engaged in the baking and dairy industries within North America."  Great, so my bagel came from somewhere within North America.  Could be close, but may not be.

The hummus: I buy President's Choice Hummus Chick Pea Dip & Spread.  The label tells me that this is a product of Canada, and the addresses given are Montreal, Toronto and Calgary.  I'd like to think that my hummus was manufactured in either Toronto or Montreal, but it very well could have been made in Calgary, which means that a lot of fuel would have been consumed to get this stuff to my front door. Does anyone have a good recipe for hummus?

I'm not even going to get into the coffee...coffee just doesn't grow here in this part of the world, so there's just no way it was locally grown.  And I don't even want to know what's in that coffee whitener.

So my summer breakfast rates fair to poor when it comes to eating locally.  What are some of the ways it could be improved?

I could buy bagels that are baked locally, in my town's bakery.  There is no guarantee that the wheat used to bake it will be local, but I would be saving the fuel for delivering the baked goods from across the country to my grocery store.

I could make my own hummus, but again, the ingredients may or may not have been grown locally.  I have yet to drive past a chick pea farm.  The only way to make my raspberries more locally grown would be to move the plants closer to my kitchen door.  And really, I don't mind the walk to the back of the yard!

This little exercise was actually quite enlightening...and I will definitely think twice when it comes to buying food items that are available locally,  instead of buying them at the chain grocery stores.

Will you take up the challenge to eat locally?

Comments

[sam]

Living in CA - local breakfast (fruit and yogurt) is easy in the Summer months. it is in the winter when nothing but porridge will do that I fall off the locavore wagon.

[Her Bad Mother]

do chick peas grow in Ontario to begin with? local flour in local bakeries? prolly not - but you can get locally grown and milled flour up at Tyrone Mills... and bake your own... ;)

[daysgoby]

Bagels aren't terribly hard to make, actually!