Thursday, November 15, 2007

Upping the challenge of the 100 mile diet

I recently came across this website, Eat Local Challenge. It is a blog with multiple authors who tackle eating local across the United States.
The post featured here challenges the local diet with concepts such as: consume regionally specific foods (that cannot be grown elsewhere), analyse farm inputs (compost vs. synthetic fertilizer), and use alternatives to transport food (biodesiel, transport compost one way). The author also promotes purchasing fair trade products.

The 100 days will be up soon enough and I am looking forward to enjoying some spicy curries. But I really would like products I purchase from afar to be fair trade. While coffee and chocolate are great fair trade products, I would love to be able to purchase fair trade spices and rice, two things I'm missing.

For this 100 mile diet challenge, I purchased some items from retailers without knowing the details of their production. In the future, I would like to take the time to interact with the farmers more and to get more details on their foods. I would like to make sure that I purchase non-genetically modified and organic (or low synthetic input) products.

What about you? Are you going to take the 100 mile diet further? What items would you like to see grown or produced locally?

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