Eat Well, Closer to Home
Local is the new yoga when it comes to food. Two passionate cooks from different parts of the province agree, and whip up regional menus to match
By Lindsey Norris
On this sultry afternoon, the sweet scent of mangos is heavy in the air. Tidy rows of trees stretch on for miles, the canopy of branches offering relief from the hot Mexican sun. Half the trees are laden with ripe mangos; the other half picked bare, their contents packed in boxes a week ago.
I hold a sun-warmed mango in my hand. It’s plump and juicy and the flesh is the colour of the sun. Eating it, I wonder if Eve’s apple was actually a mango.
A week later I pick another mango, but this one comes from a pyramid of fruit in a Canadian super-market. It’s hard as stone and chilled. Two days later, when it has softened slightly, I cut it into pieces. It’s still sweet and moist, but it scarcely compares to the fruit I had in Mexico.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. During my tour of the Mexican plantation, one of the workers explained the journey a mango undergoes before it arrives in Canada. First, the mangos are picked when they’re still green and hard, then submerged in hot water and treated with fungicides and a ripening agent. Then the fruit travels for thousands of kilometres in the back of a gas-guzzling, refrigerated truck. It’s the only way that people living in northern climates can enjoy foods such as pineapple, papaya and oranges, and enables us to enjoy a diverse diet with a greater nutritional range and the accompanying health benefits.
But even during a sweet Alberta summer and fall, you’ll find strawberries from California, tomatoes from Florida and apples from New Zealand. If the environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions released in transport isn’t enough, the prevalence of foreign food makes it harder to find local products.
Most of us don’t know where our food comes from, how it was harvested or how long it took to appear on supermarket shelves. But a growing number of Albertans are asking these questions. From the Slow Food movement and the 100-Mile Diet to movies such as Fast Food Nation, the environmental, social and economic ramifications of the global food supply are slowly becoming more widely known.
The 100-Mile Diet was put on the map by Vancouverites Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon. After they realized that the average ingredient travels between 2,500 to 4,000 kilometres (6,500 to 11,500 miles) from farm to fork, they decided to reduce their environmental footprint by only eating food that was grown, produced and packaged within a 100-mile (160-kilometre) radius of their home for one year.
Two dedicated localvores - Tara Zieminek in Edmonton and Vicki Young in Canmore - agreed to see what bounty Alberta would serve up. Not for a year, but enough to put together a three-course meal while staying within a 100-mile radius. They scoured farmers’ markets, toured farms and spent a lot of time hunched over a map.
Despite best efforts, their obedience to 100-mile radius was less than strict. Though they found local producers, two items that appear - feta cheese and bacon - contain salt, an ingredient not quite within the radius. Their thinking was this: one tenet of the 100-Mile Diet is to lessen one’s environmental footprint. But few people will give up salt. So why not support a producer who uses salt from the closest source available: the Windsor Salt plant in Lindbergh, Alberta? It isn’t exactly within 100-miles, but it’s close. And it means Vicki and Tara didn’t have to give up cheese.
Central Alberta: Tara’s Tales
Though Tara Zieminek, 26, has always been a foodie, she wasn’t a dedicated local eater until last year, when she attended Slow Food Edmonton’s Wild Boar and Beer Barbecue. What she saw made her a convert. “Being involved definitely raised my awareness about the trade balance and the environmental impacts of the food you buy,” Tara says. “When you buy local, you know who’s growing your food; you can meet them, talk to them.”
Tara estimates that it took 50 hours to put together her three-course meal of prairie mushroom soup with feta; bacon and onion perogies and whipped crème fraiche; slow roasted katahdin lamb with baby root vegetables; and strawberry honey ice cream.
“The hardest thing to give up was salt, which I didn’t give up; it was in both the bacon and cheese in my appetizer but sugar was a close second,” says Tara. “The only sugar that seems to be produced in Canada, at least that I could find, was in Taber, well outside of my radius.”
used bacon from Sunshine Organic Farm in the soup, though she says hard-core 100-milers can leave it and the feta cheese out. She bought all the produce at the Strathcona Farmers’ Market, and the rest she found in friends’ gardens. Her biggest 100-mile score was a bottle of saskatoon vinegar from the Saskatoon Ranch in Leduc.
She also discovered that you don’t always have to drive to the producer. Instead of travelling from her home in Spruce Grove to Sherwood Park to buy Prairie Mushrooms, the growers told her they were also available at Save-on-Foods in Londonderry Mall. “I know the second time around it wouldn’t take me as long to put the menu together,” Tara says. Some ingredients were easy to track down. Her lamb producer, Spruce Park Lamb, was just 10 minutes away. “It was just as convenient as going to the grocery store,” she says.
revised her menu several times when it proved too hard to find certain ingredients. While plenty of pumpkins grow in Alberta, there were no pumpkin seeds to be found in July to complete her rack of lamb. And while Alberta grows mustard seed, and there are plenty of prepared mustards available, all were in southern Alberta. But there were a few local gems she plans to incorporate into her pantry and her routine.
“To make the perogies, I used flour from Tree Stone Bakery and it had a nutty flavour,” Tara says. Tree Stone products are from locally grown, organic grains and milled in-shop. “It was like working with cornmeal, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. But it was far better than I expected.”
’s dinner for three, including a test-run on the lamb, came to about $100. But she said that much of the expense was due to initial outlay on large portions, such as the flour, that she wouldn’t have to spend the next time. “It is more expensive to eat this way,” Tara says, “Though it does depend on the product. And when you factor in the higher quality, produce from the farmers’ market is a steal, and not significantly more expensive. Garden veggies are pretty cheap, too.”
That local food is more expensive has long puzzled Mark Anielski, an ecological economist and professor of business and economics at the University of Alberta. “I asked myself how food that travels all the way from California can possibly be cheaper than the food you buy at the farm next door,” Anielski says. “No one has ever been able to explain it to me. If we did price food in terms of its total environmental cost, and the fact that it’s better for you, it might be easy to make the business case for eating local.”
Anielski also suggests that food security - the stability of a country’s food supply - may become a concern as the price of oil, and therefore transport, rises.
“What will happen when we can no longer import the food we need? The end of cheap oil will drive the interest in local produce,” Anielski says. “We have an opportunity to support local and organic growers. Even if one-third of your table is provided by local produce, that’s a step in the right direction.”
Tara weighs in:
”I was a firm believer in local eating before I tried this, so I would definitely do it again. I’m not sure I’d want to do a purely 100-mile dinner. My advice would be to start at the farmers’ markets. A lot of local producers sell there, and it saves you driving from farm to farm. Scoping out individual producers is fine as long as they are relatively close to you.”
Tara's Recipes:
The Rocky Mountains: Vicki’s Variety
When Vicki Young agreed to put together a 100-mile meal, she didn’t expect it to land her in a field in the company of a 2,500-pound bull bison.
But that’s exactly where she ended up when she travelled almost exactly 160 kilometres from her home in Canmore to the Buffalo Horn Ranch in Olds, Alberta. It might not be everyone’s idea of fun, but for Vicki, it was a chance to tour the farms she gets her food from, an option usually only available to chefs and wholesalers. And not only did the owners, Peter and Judy Haase, give Vicki a tour of the ranch, they also offered her the riches of their garden.
“Judy let me raid her garden for half the ingredients,” Vicki says. “She had beets, Swiss chard and dill. I had a menu in mind before I went, but she had some beautiful rainbow chard - orange, magenta pink and red and yellow. I was so inspired that I changed the menu.”
Vicki had never tried the 100-Mile Diet. She loves to cook, though, and supports local producers and the farmers’ markets. She waxes lyrical about the heirloom beans and tomatoes at Calgary’s Hotchkiss Herbs and Produce, and it’s not unusual for her to hold two dinner parties a week.
“The 100-Mile Diet is a tremendous philosophy,” Vicki says. “A lot of my guests hadn’t heard of it and didn’t know that many of the apples we buy come from China,” Vicki says. “Even if people could make 25 per cent of their meal from local producers it would make a difference.”
But the Rocky Mountains is not a fertile area, and it was difficult to find local producers within 160 kilometres. Remembering that the idea of the 100-Mile diet is to consume fewer fossil fuels, not to drive 100 kilometres in opposite directions to pick up bison from one farm and a tomato from the other, Vicki made a few concessions as she was putting together her menu of arugula salad, heirloom tomato soup, bison short ribs and raspberry ice cream. To make up for the pepper she sorely missed – “It was killing me not to be able to season with pepper,” she says - she served an arugula salad with peppery nasturtium petals.
Vicki took two days off work to gather everything she needed for 10 guests. She also drove more than 500 kilometres to assemble everything she needed. “Now that I’ve taken the time to learn where the suppliers are, I can combine those trips with my drives to farmers’ markets and do it in a single trip,” she says.
“I was pleasantly surprised - the dinner turned out really well, though I really missed pepper, ginger, star anise, citrus and olive oil. I wasn’t sure how the braising of the ribs would turn out using Big Rock beer instead of Bordeaux, but the Black Amber stout added a really nice coffee undertone.”
Vicki took one significant departure - she served her dessert, homemade raspberry ice cream, in chocolate cups from Le Chocolatier, a company based in Canmore. “The chocolate isn’t local; it comes from Belgium, but you can watch the staff make the truffles by hand,” Vicki says, “and thatÕs about as local as it gets.”
Vicki weighs in
“This was a great experience. I think the 100-Mile Diet is really effective at making people more conscious of what they’re eating. But, as a cook, I love food too much to limit my options - if I can’t use more ingredients and spices, it takes the fun out of it. But I’ll definitely buy B.C. fruit that’s in season and skip South American strawberries in January, and I do support my local producers as much as possible.”
Vicki's Recipes:
Eat local, don’t starve
You want to eat local, but you live so far from farmers’ markets that you’d have to subsist on wild hare and stewed grasses. Here’s how you can incorporate local eating into your routine.
- Start small. Incorporate one locally grown or produced food per day or per meal. Or, eat locally for one meal a day or one meal a week.
- Grow your own. Nothing is more local than your own backyard, balcony or windowsill. Many herbs and plants aren’t that hard to grow.
- Make friends with your freezer. Okay, so not much grows during our infamous winter. Freeze, can, dehydrate or pickle the local goods that are cheap and plentiful in summer.
- Make it fun. Don’t toil alone. Invite a few friends to a 100-mile dinner potluck. The stories of your guests’ triumphant discovery of local ingredients will inspire.
- Think like a chef. The best chefs let available ingredients dictate the menu. Instead of writing a grocery list from home based on a recipe, hit the farmers’ market or grocery store and see what’s available and then design meals.
- Redefine local. So you can’t envision life without coffee or chocolate. Chances are a company nearby roasts fair-trade coffee beans or cocoa ensuring that you’ll get the best taste from food that was grown thousands of miles away, while still supporting local businesses and sustainable farming.
For more information or to calculate your own 100-mile radius, visit 100milediet.org.
