During this Earth Day week, many people around the country are pledging to eat food only from a 100-mile radius. These locavores (I’m surprised Wordspy hasn’t picked up on this term.) make only a few exceptions for things like flour, pasta, coffee and so forth. The New York Times, in today’s “Dining In” section has an article about them here. They recently featured no impact man as well. I love to talk about these concepts. Last summer, when we went on the Rice Diet I came up with the concept of “Greenmarket Plus”. The Rice Diet helped us lose weight: the husband lost about 45 lbs and I lost about 10 lbs. But it was its emphasis on fresh fruits and veggies that started me trolling the greenmarkets in earnest. I discovered that it wasn’t really that hard in spring, summer and fall to eat locally. For most things. And we could keep our diet within the Rice Diet (low fat, high whole grains, fruits, veggies and low sodium) specs. However, like the aforementioned locavores, we do make exceptions and they are:
Coffee and Tea
Chocolate
Flour
Pasta
Rice
Beans
Spices
Chinese condiments like sesame oil, peanut oil, rice vinegar, etc
Olive oil
Milk
Hotpot (This has many ingredients that can’t be obtained locally, but I can certainly make it myself and use as much local stuff as I can.)
Interestingly, all these concepts are right in line with Frances Moore Lappe’s book Diet for a Small Planet, which had a huge impact on my way of thinking about food. Of course we’re lucky that we live in a city that has greenmarkets every day of the week. We eat well, we love our diet. It’s about eating for our health and for the planet, but we also enjoy our food.
