Garden of Eatin’
When I came to Banff last spring, I had visions of living in a little cottage, with a little garden, growing tomatoes and flowers. Quickly I discovered no one had gardens here. Bears will eat your berries. The elk will eat your veggies. So a few fantasies were quickly put to rest. Oh well.
But there’s something about living in the mountains that makes me want to be able to grow my own food. As I’m still not quite at that stage yet, a couple of books filled in the gaps nicely and got the ‘ol melon a turnin’.
In The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating a couple from Vancouver, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon decide to eat locally for an entire year. At first it sounded impossible to me; no avocados, mangoes, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Coke and no potato chips. But they do much better than you would expect, or than I expected, anyhow, finding farmers around the Vancouver area who grow everything they need (from veggies to livestock). I think Chris and I might kill each other with a project such as this one, as I thought the authors might half-way through, too. Canning corn at midnight sounds like a recipe for disaster. But the fact that they make it all the way to the one year mark, happy, feeling healthy, and not desperately missing junk food was fascinating. It’s also caused me to start looking a little more closely at what I eat. Maybe not so far as to grow my own food yet, but to at least question buying blueberries from New Zealand and to enjoy Canadian fruits and vegetables when they are in season.
Doug Fine is a man in New Mexico with a similar mission: to not only eat locally, but to stop living off fossil fuels. He’s written about his successes and failures in his book Farewelll my Subaru and also on his website. I’m particularly interested to hear of his success with goat’s mik ice cream. mmmm
He’ll be speaking as part of the Mountain Culture series tomorrow night, which I am really disappointed to be missing. Hopefully the Banff Centre will have videos of the talk available online in the near future.
Filed under Food, Gardening, Non-fiction | Comment (1)One Response to “Garden of Eatin’”
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Great article, Sarah. These efforts are really interesting and worthwhile. Picton, Ontario really pushes eating local foods and last year as we took the ferry in, we picked up the brown grocery bags they were supplying to visitors and residents for their locally grown goodies.
I’m not quite there yet. I do my best to buy Canadian goods, thinking that this a start. I block aisles, carefully reading labels. This went as far as my car. Once I found out it came out of the Toronto plant (in Canada !) it was a deal.