160 Kilometers
I’m reading The 100-Mile Diet now, a gift from Shirley for Christmas. It’s written by Canadians in Vancouver which makes it kind of odd that they refer to the range within which they’re allowed to eat in miles instead of kilometers, though I suppose The 160-Kilometer Diet doesn’t have quite the same marketing appeal, nor does it fit quite so well across the front cover.
After reading a chapter or two in the mornings over my coffee, it’s always tempting to wonder where our food came from and how far it travelled- certainly the coffee, though organically grown in the shade and traded fairly, came a long ways. Presumably alot of our other foodstuffs come from away, too, though I rarely look so I can’t rightly say. The stuff we purchase at the farmer’s market is more likely to have been produced within 100 miles of SF, but I can’t really be sure…
Just now I looked up our 100-mile radius:
Oh boy! We get Roseville and Turlock and almost Ukiah! I have no frame of reference for these places; I should really find out what grows and swims around here, besides left-wing democrats and cold-water surfers. I wonder how many Starbucks there are in this 100-Mile radius… hmm… at least 500 within 90 miles.
At any rate, though it probably can’t measure up to eating local, there is alot of eating organic going on here (which is sometimes worse, I know, since the distance it must travel sometimes outweighs the points it might have earned by being organic). We have Trader Joe’s to thank for the excellent variety of dried fruits, especially the currants and tart cherries for our morning oatmeal.
