think you could do it?

A month without plastic. A year without waste. Banning food that travels more than 100 miles. Read about some brave people who've done it and get inspired...

A reporter for the Chicago Tribune - plus her husband, 3-year-old girl and a 7-month-old boy - try to live without plastic for a week. From paper diapers to shampoo pucks, she learns that it's best to take this one step at a time.

If you can't imagine having no coffee, tea, chocolate, olive oil, or even sugar in your diet for 100 days, watch the The 100-Mile Challenge, premiering April 5 on Food Network Canada.

Inspired by the best-selling book The 100-Mile Diet by James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, the series follows six British Columbian families who make the difficult, but rewarding, commitment to consume only food and drink produced within a 100-mile radius for 100-days.

And if you need more inspiration, The Story of Stuff is a good place to start.

food for thought

The recent outbreak of listeria in processed foods has many thinking plenty about just where our food comes from.

I read an interesting editorial today about this very thing:

Michael Den Tandt wrote "Increasingly, Canadians are hyperaware of what they eat. This is partly a result of higher food prices. It's partly due to the childhood obesity epidemic. And it's partly due to greater concern about health, driven by baby boomers who are trying to extend their active life spans.

Mainly though, the trend is driven by the Green movement. Concern about food quality and safety is a sibling of the fight against climate change."

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that it's unbelievable that Maple Leaf Foods has over 2oo products on recall. I mean...200? It just boggles the mind that there were that many in the first place.

Full story here

100 Mile Diet

how to really eat local (or, the anti-SUV diet)

One of the most earth-friendly things we can do is to buy local foods, yet we're supermarket shoppers, pushing around endangered sea bass flown in from Chile next to bananas shipped in from India, so most of us don't really know how. And until recently, no one seemed to care.

The surprising popularity of Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon's book, The 100 Mile Diet has turned eating local into a movement. Their inspiration? "When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles - call it 'the SUV diet.'"

So, for one year, they bought or gathered their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, getting up-close-and-personal with issues ranging from the family-farm crisis to the environmental value of organic pears shipped across the globe.

So what's a supermarket shopper to do? Start with these sites:

CBC's Marketplace did a show on food ingredients...and where they really come from. For example, if it claims to be ice cream but doesn't contain any cream, it's probably not from around here. Read their tips here.

NOW Toronto's cover story on local eating. 'Your Local Farmers Market' in Vancouver has some fresh tips here. For Ontarions, a great list of home delivery and natural food buying clubs.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, buy Adria Vasil's ecoholic! Lots of ideas here for you to chew on.