The 100 Mile Diet

This week I read "Plenty," a book written by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who started the famous "100 Mile Diet" (only eating food raised within 100 miles of where you live). The book tells the story of what it was like to live for a year on the diet. What the authors bring out beautifully is what doing the diet, and thinking about food and food culture, taught them about the spiritual crisis of our rootless modern condition. These aren't religious people, but the concern they write of is in part religious. From the book:

My whole generation, I think, feels these tensions. No one I know seems able to settle in one calling or one place. It no longer seems believable that there once were people who spent a lifetime working on a single illuminated manuscript. This is an era not of spiritual dedication but of spiritual shopping -- of shopping, period. We have delayed or abandoned every form of commitment -- from marriage to child-rearing -- with the exception of debt. ...A part of us seems to hunger for collapse -- for the moment when we are truly forced to change.

This 100 Mile Diet seems to me like a secular version of a religious fast: it seeks to reorient the individual, to remind him of Things That Are, and of our radical dependence, despite the illusion of freedom. In fact, as Wendell Berry has written, it's a form of un-freedom to be at the mercy of industrialized and globalized agriculture. If the transportation system breaks down, and you're not able to eat because your food can't be shipped in from halfway around the world, how free are you? And spiritually, what does it do to your understanding of the world and your place in it when eating becomes an entirely commercial and abstract act? Writes Berry (from "What Are People For?"):

Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.

If you go here, you can punch in your zip code and get a map telling you what the 100-mile radius from your home is. Could you survive if all your food and drink had to come from within that radius? When my dad was a little boy back in rural Louisiana in the 1930s, they pretty much lived the 100-Mile Diet all the time, especially with hunting, fishing and growing gardens. My dad tells me if hard times come again, he'd know how to feed himself and his family. Me, I don't have a clue. I haven't had to learn it like he did back in the day. But it bothers me that there's not a local agriculture within a hundred miles of where I live capable of supplying an adequate amount of food for my area in case of crisis. Granted, I do live in one of the biggest cities in America, so it's not really fair to expect 100 miles to feed all of us. Still, it's a point well worth considering.