Meet the Gurus of Local Food: The Original 100-Milers

The 100-Mile Challenge started out as one couple's personal food journey. First they blogged, then their story became a book, and then a TV series involving the entire town of Mission, Canada.

For one year starting in the spring of 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon really stepped up to the local-food plate. They learned to live without any food grown outside a 100-mile radius. In some cases, they even found substitutes they liked better (in others, not so much). I had a chance to talk with them about their year of eating strictly local and, now that the challenge is officially over, how much they're still sticking to it.

Planet Green: What surprised you during your summer in Mission?

Alisa Smith: I was surprised at first with how much attention the families who did the challenge paid to what each other were doing, so they became the food police for each other. We hadn't really anticipated that, so there were some tense moments when they tried to get everyone on the same page with the rules.

James MacKinnon: Yeah, that was probably the biggest surprise because Alisa and I thought we needed to figure out ways to make the challenge easier for people, see if they needed some easy outs from time to time. But they said they wanted to do it 100 percent hardcore, and we were ready to have that happen.

Planet Green: What were some of those tense moments?

Alisa Smith: Some people decided to take quite seriously some of the stuff in the book, but in the television show, you didn't have to totally follow the 100 percent rule. So there were one or two families that decided that they would quite happily drink coffee, and if they got more than 100 miles, some of the families were really incensed by that.

James MacKinnon: Coffee was one of the big stumbling blocks, because it's not just a food or drink, it's something that people are actually addicted to. And they had to drop it. The amazing thing was that they all did it, cold turkey. And they got through it faster and a lot more easily than they would have expected.

The main lesson for the 100-mile challenge is that it's tough to get going, it's tough to make a change in your life, it takes a lot of commitment at first, but then people end up getting into the good part of it, the deepening experience and then the changes in their health and changes in how they're feeling and their sense of community, all of that happens way more quickly than people expect that it will.

Alisa Smith: Two things I would say in terms of coffee. We don't usually recommend people do the 100 percent because it is so difficult. So if coffee is the one thing holding you back from otherwise eating locally, we're fine with people having their coffee, just maybe paying more attention to is it fair trade, is it organic, that kind of thing, so it still has social value attached to it. (On the other hand, I don't drink coffee at all. I like herbal teas, from herbs we've picked ourselves. Sage tea is one of my favorites.)

Planet Green: What were the most challenging foods to get locally?

James MacKinnon: Every region is different, but in our region, it seems to be wheat products. So if you think of the list of foods that have wheat in them—it's everything, it's all the staples that people have, bread and pasta, muffins and pancakes, the list goes on and on and on. So for us that was a huge challenge and we approached it in 2 different ways. One was to find acceptable substitutes, just learning to really like potatoes, things like that, but also to really dig into the food culture of the place we live in and see if somebody might be growing wheat or whether or not it was grown in the past and could be produced here and things like that. And through that process, we did eventually find one farmer who was growing wheat in our area, so we were able to solve that problem. And people in Mission had exactly that same challenge, they were all really struggling without wheat in their diet or any wheat products, we ended up having to come in and help them do some searching.

Alisa Smith: I think that the biggest thing to realize about winter is the fact that you really need to prepare for it in advance, that if you want to eat 100 percent locally, you need to be doing some canning and freezing and drying of foods for when the more difficult months come.

We ran out of some things because it's really foreign to how we eat now too, to imagine how much corn do we need for six months, we're not used to planning on that scale. The funny thing we found was that in the early part of the winter we were almost scared to use the stuff we preserved, and we were just eating, you know, winter vegetables, like potatoes, carrots, cabbage, things like that. But then we realized sort of around New Years, we had lots of stuff to eat, we should just enjoy it.

Planet Green: Were you able to quantify the effect the diet had on your carbon footprint?

James MacKinnon: There's all kinds of carbon calculators out there online, and most of them now include a question about your lifestyle, how far is most of your food coming from. And if you just change the answer to that one question in the calculation, it makes a huge difference in your overall carbon impact.

It comes out to be—if everybody on earth lived like the person who's answering the questions on the calculator, then how many planet earths' resources would we need—and with most North Americans, it comes out to about six planet earths or more. Just changing to local food dropped that by one planet earth, so it's pretty significant.

Planet Green: What are some of the other takeaway messages from the film?

Alisa Smith: I would also say you will feel healthier than you've ever felt in your life, and everyone on the diet experienced that. We were really surprised and happy with that.

James MacKinnon: Another big surprise from this whole experience is, we'd always been asked by people whether or not the 100-mile diet actually worked as a weightloss diet, and we never knew because the only people who'd really done it were Alisa and me. So we put that to the test, and it seems like the answer is yes, and in some cases the change in people's weight and their health was really dramatic.

Planet Green: What happened when the challenge ended?

Alisa Smith: Five of the six core families have dedicated to continue eating locally as much as possible.

James MacKinnon: We eat about 90 percent locally all the time, that's become pretty comfortable for us. We choose to keep eating this way because it's a better way to eat, so we're sticking with it.

Planet Green: What makes up that remaining, non-local ten percent?

James MacKinnon: It ends up coming from two different things: things like chocolate, and nobody makes 100 percent local ingredient beer in our area, so if I want a can of beer, then I have to get that from a non-local source. So things like that, and then it's just some staple foods—we don't always want to make pasta from scratch from local wheat that we have to grind ourselves. So sometimes we're buying those sorts of things, olive oil, a couple of just basic staples.

Planet Green: Is there a top five list of the most challenging foods to get locally?

James MacKinnon: I would say, cooking oils, spices, salt, grains, and as a general category, winter foods. Depending on where you live...

For olive oil, we used butter and sometimes clarified butter, or we did find some local oils, like hazelnut oil was available so that could be used in some cases. And most places—we've been pretty much everywhere in North America, and almost everywhere we've been has some kind of locally produced product that you could use to replace almost anything—except coffee.

Alisa Smith: And one that people might expect is citrus fruits, because they're used to having them, but that is interesting because we find that when people just try what local fruits and berries there are, they're surprised at how tasty they are when they're picked in season and when they're ripe, as opposed to the kind you buy at a grocery store. The strawberry you buy from Peru in the winter and it's white in the middle and doesn't taste good anyway. And people all of a sudden say, "Oh, I don't need a glass of orange juice every morning if I don't live in California or Florida, I can have a glass of apple juice or something like that." And if you buy it from a small-scale producer, it's so tasty, you don't miss the things that you think you need.

And in terms of trying to deal with the hard-to-get foods, salt is the trickiest. If you can't do without it, or if you can't live without things like coffee, we actually suggest that people not be that strict about it. Spices are something you find that you can just change the way you cook, that you don't need to use curry powder necessarily. If you're cooking with fresh herbs, they have a lot of flavor and you don't miss the spices.

Planet Green: Did you encounter, or inspire, any great food revivals?

James MacKinnon: While we were looking for wheat, we found that a lot of areas where we live used to be self-sustaining with wheat and other grains, and all of that just disappeared. And now, because of interest in the 100-mile diet, that grain-growing tradition is being revived here. There's quite a bit of grain being grown here, and all of that change has happened in basically three years. So that's been exciting, to see how much and how quickly things can change when people start asking for local food.

Alisa Smith: One neat revival is, you could call them ugly vegetables: all the heritage varieties that were grown 100 years ago but have stopped being grown because they are not the biggest, red tomatoes, they are maybe the black-colored tomatoes or the green colored tomatoes and they're actually the tastiest varieties and people are willing to try more unusual foods now.

Planet Green: When you were following the 100-mile rule strictly—what did you do when you really wanted a beer?

James MacKinnon: There's always something. Everywhere in North America, people have figured out a way to produce hearty drinks. In our area there's wine, there's hard cider, and there's people starting to do micro-distilling. So very small-scale, small-batch things like vodka. I can't think of anywhere in North America that wouldn't have something on offer for people who would like to have a glass of wine or a cocktail.