When some people want to green their diet, they go vegan, free-range, vegetarian or local. The 100 Mile diet is based on the premise that the most environmentally friendly way to eat is to only consume products that were grown within a hundred mile radius of your home.

Guess what? This is hard! Especially if you live in a place with changing seasons, harsh environments and cold winters.

In one instance, Alisa Smith and J.B Mackinnon (the authors) write

Call me naive, but I never knew that flour would be struck from our 100-Mile Diet. Wheat products are just so ubiquitous, “the staff of life,” that I had hazily imagined the stuff must be grown everywhere. But of course: I had never seen a field of wheat anywhere close to Vancouver, and my mental images of late-afternoon light falling on golden fields of grain were all from my childhood on the Canadian prairies. What I was able to find was Anita’s Organic Grain & Flour Mill, about 60 miles up the Fraser River valley. I called, and learned that Anita’s nearest grain suppliers were at least 800 miles away by road. She sounded sorry for me. Would it be a year until I tasted a pie?

The Hundred Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating chronicles a Canadian couple’s attempt at following this diet for an entire year. It’s a fantastic, thought-provoking book that shows that sometimes being green is hard, being inventive is rewarding, and being green, well, it can’t be beat.
If you want more information about this book, or would like to order a copy, head over to Amazon!

image via amazon