This mission, if you choose to accept it, will be eaten with great gusto!

People in developed countries have so many food options that a trip to the grocery market can be a herculean exercise in quick decision-making. A huge quantity of the options in the market come from all over the world, sometimes having thousands of food miles attached to them. A food mile is a numerical indicator of how far food had to travel before it ends up in your local supermarket. Knowing that products with high food miles cause tremendous environmental impact, some people in the world have consciously tried to create a diet regiment called the “250 mile diet.”

The main idea behind this diet is that you eat nothing unless it was harvested and manufactured within 250 miles of your present location. Granted, 250 miles is a very hardcore objective to set, and even if you just limited yourself to food produced in the country you are in, you would still be making a major contribution to the fight against climate change. Nonetheless many people have succeeded in eating foods produced within a 250 mile radius.

In some cases, if you want to eat something like crackers, and depending on where you live, you may need to learn how to make crackers yourself; you could also not eat crackers and instead slice a french baguette into thin slices and use that. Basically you will have to learn how to research local farms and other fresh food producers in your area. Here are some suggestions on how you might go about doing that:

1) A directory can go a long way to helping you find out this information. There is an online website called Local Harvest [www.localharvest.org] that is helpful in finding farms.

2) You could also visit your local grocery marts and ask the manager if they get any of their food products from local producers.

3) Another great way to get to know your local food options is to go to a farmer’s market in your area. We have compiled a list of some farmer’s markets [www.sundancechannel.com] on Eco-mmunity Map, so feel free to check that out. Also, if you end up finding more farmer’s markets that were not listed in our map, we would love it if you created a map marker for the market on our map so that the next person in your area can easily find it on Eco-mmunity.

4) Another great way to get started would be to check out the blog of Leda Meredith, a woman who has pioneered the 250 mile diet with amazing success. Check out her blog here [ledameredith.net].

Thanks for checking out THE GREEN Blog. If you do try the 250 mile diet, even if you just experiment with it, please consider coming back here and making an Eco-mmunity map marker that chronicles your experiences with the 250 mile diet. If you give your marker a title of “250 Mile Diet: (Your City Name)” we will be featuring these markers in upcoming Greenzine mailing lists. Who says you can’t garner a super hero reputation by being green?

It’s easy to think, “Local food is always the best answer,” and leave it at that; most of the time, it might be right, but new information is emerging that disputes local’s lofty position at the throne of TreeHugging food. The notion of “food miles,” the distance your food has traveled to get to your plate, is absolutely an important consideration, but, as it turns out, we might not be able to let the buck stop there.

In a piece for the New York Times [www.nytimes.com], James E. McWilliams, the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America,” argues that it isn’t as simple as sourcing your food from local farmers, at farmer’s markets and through community-supported agriculture, and calling it a day. While there are undeniable benefits of eating local — unbeatable freshness, which leads to better taste, a more meaningful connection with your food and where it comes from and a more mindful approach to eating, just to name a few — McWilliams believes that, though it’s quite intuitive, fewer food miles (and, you’d think, fewer greenhouse gas emissions) doesn’t necessary mean it’s better for the environment. What?

“It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator,” says McWilliams. “Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call ‘factor inputs and externalities’ — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.” Given these ideas — a more life cycle analysis-type approach — the relative carbon footprint of foods, both local and otherwise, can change very quickly. To wit: lamb raised in New Zealand’s lush clover pastures and shipped to Britain “produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.”

Hmm. So what does that mean for the burgeoning “eat local” movement? It sounds bad, but, says McWilliams, it absolutely doesn’t have to be: “‘Eat local’ advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn’t. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
“Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.”
For the most part, we think McWilliams gets it right; essentially, what he’s saying can be boiled down to a great quote, also from the Times: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” [www.nytimes.com] There is no room for blind consumption in the green world, and, like many other environmental issues, there is no silver bullet for eating green all the time, and no one method — all organic, all local, etc. — will a perfectly green meal make. Get all the details about this new take on local here in the New York Times [www.nytimes.com].

The “100 Mile Diet” is pretty much what it sounds like: you source everything you eat (or as much as possible) from within a 100 mile radius of your house, and, in many ways, it has become the poster child for eating like a TreeHugger. Because everything you eat (or, again, as much as possible) comes from your own neck of the woods, it makes some very tangible differences, like cutting way back on food miles — from an average of 1500 miles to less than 100 — and some less tangible ones, too, like forcing you (in a nice way) to really think about where everything you consume comes from, and helping you engage in mindful eating and consumption. As a follow-up to yesterday’s intro to green eating practices [www.sundancechannel.com], practicing the 100 mile diet is one way to green your food in a hurry, and TreeHugger has a slew of info on it. Here are some of the best.

1) We were first introduced to the idea [www.treehugger.com] a few years back (here’s part two [www.treehugger.com]), where we learned what some of the implications were for living on such a diet. These include both good things — fewer food miles, a palpable connection to our own food supply — and bad, like reduced selection, less variety and far less convenience.
2) Still, we liked the idea enough to hold a contest for a 100 Mile Thanksgiving [www.treehugger.com] (pictured below); after we gave them a cheat sheet, for the New York area, at least [www.treehugger.com] readers sent in their menus, and we were impressed by the winner’s [www.treehugger.com] ability to assimilate the contest with the tradition of the big meal.
3) The movement has gained enough traction among gourmets and foodies to have a name coined for those who practice it: locavores [www.treehugger.com]. Clever, don’t you think?
4) As the idea became less and less obscure, more and more people began needing more information; as such, the 100 Mile Diet website [www.treehugger.com] was born.
5) In the same vein, we found dinner party menus [www.treehugger.com] for 100-mile diets in four cities, helping to prove that it is indeed possible to follow the 100 mile rules and still have an entertaining, satisfying evening with friends.

6) Still, finding suitable food (and enough substitutions) is an ongoing challenge, but we have some ideas and resources [www.treehugger.com] to help combat this predicament.
7) TreeHugger even practiced what it was preaching, and had a little dinner gathering for some of its staff [www.treehugger.com] (pictured below) in Newport, Rhode Island; it was a perfect 100-mile meal, but it sure was fun!
If doing it yourself is still too intimidating or time-consuming, it’s good to know that at least you can still go out for a good, local meal; Harvest Restaurant [www.treehugger.com] and Konstam [www.treehugger.com] are just two of many, many examples of restaurants jumping about the 100 mile bandwagon.