By Jeffrey Hollender, Chief Inspired Protagonist
Here in Vermont there is a focus on the "localvore" movement, or the practice of eating foods produced much closer to where we live than the trucked- and flown-in food that a majority of Americans buy today. As a way to get people thinking about the idea, quite a few Vermont communities have been holding something called the 100-Mile Challenge, an event in which participants try to eat only things that are grown or raised within 100 miles of their kitchens. It sounded like an interesting experiment. So I gave it a taste drive.

Why play with our food like this? Because eating locally-produced foods is a relatively simple act that provides a bounty of benefits. Most of the food we eat travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles to get to our plates. When we eat meats and vegetables grown near hour homes, we lessen or eliminate the impacts created by those miles, and that helps the world in these crucial ways:

Those are some pretty impressive advantages. There’s another one, too: When we eat locally, we gain an understanding of where our food comes from. I think that’s hugely important because food is fundamental to our lives and yet we know very little about it except that when we need more, we make a trip to the supermarket. For the most part, we have no idea what’s involved in filling a salt or pepper shaker. Or making an omelet. Or squeezing a fresh glass of juice. We take all of these things for granted. This kind of unintentional ignorance helps maintain the status quo of our nation’s unhealthy industrial food chain and that’s not a good thing. When we know where our food comes from and who raised or grew it for us, we know more about both what we’re eating and the kind of world it came from. And that means we know more about how to fix both.

Our present food system doesn’t encourage local eating. It doesn’t promote family farms or heirloom produce or artisanal cheeses. Based as it is on large-scale factory farming and an ideology that says cheaper is better, the way we’ve come to eat today doesn’t necessarily make the 100-Mile Challenge an easy one. We have to shop a little harder to find local substitutes for the things we want to eat. We have to get creative when it comes to planning menus. We have to learn to do without in the cases of certain foods and we may have to eat more of other things depending on what’s available. It is, in fact, quite challenging indeed.

The good news is that in most parts of the country, it’s quite possible to live, at least temporarily, outside the corporate food chain. Here in Vermont, we are especially blessed. In spite of some difficult modern times, we have a decent number of family farms, and many of them are diversifying into organics and value-added products in order to survive.

So we lucky Vermonters can fairly easily find local wine and local beer (though made from imported grains), virtually every dairy product imaginable, including great local cheeses; plenty of locally-baked breads (though, again, the grains they contain are usually from elsewhere); meats that range from beef to bison to chicken and even emu; just about every fresh veggie imaginable (at least during summer); and a great variety of fresh fruits that come and go with their respective seasons.

In fact, it was amazing to me just how bountiful a meal it’s possible to create from foods harvested within 100 miles of our home. Using these and other ingredients, we were able on two special occasions to enjoy terrific meals that used only locally-produced ingredients. The first was a meeting between the Seventh Generation marketing team and the folks from Treehugger.com. With about 14 people around the table, we dipped our toe in the localvore waters. Next time around, we had about 50 friends who were in town to attend the BALLE conference. These meals were not the equal of the meals we usually eat. They were better, and thanks to a local agricultural economy that already understands the value of local foods, they didn’t require too much extra effort to assemble.

Of course, you’ve probably already read between the lines here and found a bunch of qualifiers in my family’s 100-mile experiment. For one, we didn’t spend a whole month or even a week eating locally. Our experience consisted of a couple of meals that we undertook as the opportunities presented themselves. Even so, I’d estimate that on a daily basis, we average between 25% to 50% local ingredients. There are some things I am unwilling to give up, including coffee and tea. I think it’s perfectly okay to have a few not-from-here things in your pantry as long as you choose them carefully and generally try to stock as locally as possible.

In Vermont and in most parts of North America, eating locally in July is an entirely different proposition from eating locally in January, at which time your choice is roughly between tree bark and whatever dead grass is still poking through the snow. Okay, so it’s not quite that bad.

We can stock up and pickle and preserve all kinds of things when they’re in season, but we’re still going to need some outside culinary help in the colder months if we want a diet with any variety.

And of course, the success each of us has in eating locally depends on what our locality is like. Here in Vermont, it’s relatively easy because we haven’t yet paved over all our agricultural lands and still have farmers using them. We benefit from a strong local-is-better ethic that has helped many family farms, organic growers, and other producers keep going. Ours is a state tailor-made for the 100-Mile Challenge because its citizens are already doing a lot of the needed work. It might not be as easy in, say, Houston or Phoenix.

It’s also not as easy to eat local if it’s a luxury you can’t afford. Mass-marketed food is cheaper than the local kind, often by a long shot. This is understandable in the short term but unacceptable in the long run. It’s not okay that only those who are well off can afford to eat food that’s better for their families and the planet. We need to work to make healthy, organic, local food affordable to all. Some of that will come from ending the hidden subsidies and externalized costs that conspire to make long-distance factory food less expensive. But those who can currently afford the alternative can also move the process along by buying local when and wherever possible. This builds local markets, encourages more local production, and eventually lowers prices as local foods become increasingly plentiful and less “niche market.”

For that and many other reasons, we should all try to eat as locally as we can whenever possible. We should all take our own 100-Mile Challenges and work to make this kind of lifestyle the rule rather than the exception. For my part, I need to do more than a meal now and again. And it’s something I’m working on. Now that I’ve taken the first few footsteps on that road, I have a better understanding how it can be done and a better appreciation of the benefits it brings. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will a locally-based national food economy. It’s something each of us can only do one day and one meal at a time. What’s important is not that we all become perfect eaters overnight, but that we’re always working toward the goal and toward a harvest of hope we can all share together some day soon.

Want more information about eating local? Check out http://100milediet.org/home for more information on the challenge and the ideas behind it.