What surprised me when I started looking at what I received was that - although it was all organic - that a lot of it came from the United States and beyond! Now I do love my brothers and sisters to the south, but is it really right that my cauliflower came from California? My apples were even from the U.S. and it is apple season in Ontario right now. Pears were also U.S. - they were REALLY good by the way. I live about an hour away from the Niagara region, about 30 minutes south of Holland's Landing (prime vegetable growing territory just north of the city) and certainly within several hours of some of the best farmland in Ontario.
So here is the origin of my produce as best as I can tell:
Cauliflower - California
Broccoli - Lasalette, Ontario
Persimmons - U.S.
Kiwis - Chile
Bananas - Peru
Potatoes - Unknown
Chard - Baden, Ontario
Gala Apples - U.S.
Bosc Pears - U.S.
Carrots - Baden, Ontario
Avocados - Mexico
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100-Mile_Diet
What started as a column for an e-mag turned into the book was written by a Canadian couple from British Columbia who decided to eat only foods grown within 100 miles of where they lived. The book details their struggles and triumphs with living in a world where much of what we rely on as staples in our diet spends countless hours and miles on the road getting to us. Just think - coffee, tea, flour, bananas - things that we buy regularly would be outside of what you could eat for a year. There are stories of them riding their bikes out in rural Vancouver (a beautiful city by the way if you haven't been!) trying to run down locally grown wheat that they can grind to make bread.
So what is better....and I AM asking the question.....eating locally grown food that is not organic, or eating organic food that has potentially traveled thousands of miles to be on our table?
Wow...what a great question. I suppose how well we could make this work depends a lot on where we're from. Depending on where you live, a 100-mile limit could cut out a lot of essentials: flour, sugar, etc., and other things that science has shown are essential to sustaining human life, such as coffee and chocolate.
ReplyDeleteBen
http://kissthecook-ben.blogspot.com/
While the concept is interesting, for me, it comes down to what you are willing to sacrifice. I can't imagine starting a day without my much anticipated coffee. I could live without avacado's, but I don't want to. Here in Ontario, we have about 2 months of fresh produce available, and it is second to none. I would take a non organic cob of corn, or basket of strawberries, freshly picked from Ontario over anything shipped 4000 miles to the nearest grocery store. Veggies and fruits are meant to ripen on the vine or in the earth. Picking them early to ripen while en route just seems wrong, but acceptable only when there are no alternatives. We get a lot of produce from California, most likely due to the climate that allows them to grow multiple crops within a year, but this overgrowing leads to robbing the soil of nutrients which have no time to replenish. And we know it isn't the plant that enriches the flavour, but the soil from which they grow. The other issue is the lack of controls over what can be classified as organic. Organic as a concept is great, but, I would rather support a local farmer when I can.
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