100-Mile Challenge: Mission in Mission, B.C.

Who would have thought that the personal goal of a couple of locavores (or, localvores, as rendered by some) would have grown into a documentary showcased on the Food Network?

The 100-Mile Challenge documentary series starts on Sunday April 5th, 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. PST.  Vancouver-based James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith have put the local eating diet challenge to families living in Mission, B.C.  Why Mission?  Located in the Fraser Valley, this town practically has a fertile backyard of fruits and vegetables.

This show might seem to some people like another reality show, of the dozens out there, that appeal to the masses.  If anything, it may open up some eyes to the practical and healthy reasons for eating local.  For those who purchase local and/or organic food already, they understand the value for money: Food of superior taste and nutrition compared to that which is heavily fertilized, injected with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or hormones, picked before ripeness, and shipped hundreds of miles to its destination while emitting tons of CO2.

The documentary will hopefully elicit questions as to why farmland is quietly being removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), which is presumably protected by the B.C. Agricultural Land Reserve Commission.

Read how MacKinnon and Smith first started as locavores on
their 100-mile diet, captured in a series featured in The Tyee, a
Vancouver-based online publication:

     The Tyee: 100-Mile Diet
     http://thetyee.ca/Series/2005/06/28/100Mile/

For more information on the show, see:

     100 Mile Challenge
     http://100mile.foodtv.ca/

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For more information on B.C.’s agricultural land, go to:

     SmartGrowthBC
    
http://www.smartgrowth.bc.ca/AboutUs/Issues/AgriculturalLand/tabid/111/Default.aspx

     BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly
     http://www.bcstudies.com/issues.php?subject=58&cumulative

For more information on how urban development is threatening B.C. farmland, download the  Forever Farmland report at:

     David Suzuki Foundation: Forever Farmland
     http://www.davidsuzuki.org/WOL/News_Releases/web_of_life04190601.asp

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Watch a video clip about the show on Global TV:

     http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/bc/video/index.html?releasePID=P_yNDC3veE1dA1W2CE1762o2puESCfOg

—–

News of 100-Mile Challenge documentary was also reported on CBC News:

New TV Series Captures B.C. Town’s Attempt at 100-Mile Diet

Six Mission, B.C. families challenged to eat only locally produced food

Last updated:  Thursday, April 2, 2009

After enlisting families in a West Coast town to adopt a locavore
diet, authors James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith are ready to broadcast
the outcome — and hopefully spark similar challenges across North
America.

100-Mile Challenge, a new documentary series beginning
Sunday evening on the Food Network, follows the couple as they cheer on
families in the town of Mission, B.C., who have agreed to eat only
foods grown, produced and raised within 100 miles of their homes for
100 days.

The Vancouver-based couple had chronicled their own experience
following an ultra-local meal plan in a series in the B.C. web magazine
The Tyee and later in their much-lauded 2007 book The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (alternately released as Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally).

Smith told CBC cultural affairs show Q that she and
MacKinnon decided to extrapolate their experience to a more general
population because, “we’re just two people. That’s not a good test case
really if you want to transform a country, to get everyone eating
locally.”

The couple wanted to “get as many different types of people as
possible to try to eat locally and see if they can do it and how
they’re changed by it,” Smith said.

Mission ‘a blessed location’

MacKinnon
called Mission “a blessed location” because, despite its prime Fraser
Valley placement, few residents of the former agricultural town “were
eating anything from the farms around them.”

“If people were eating local food in Mission, it was by accident,” he said.

The six diverse families followed in the series were tested right
off the bat, with the couple stripping the participants’ kitchens and
pantries of all non-local products.

“That meant everything, down to the yeast, down to the ingredients in the vinegar. Absolutely everything,” MacKinnon said.

“Some people were left literally with nothing, so the transformation in the way they were eating was total,” he said.

“When you go through that kind of revolution in something you do three times a day, it’s an enormous hit to your life.”

Smith pointed out that while some participants initially had a bit
of an edge because of their cooking skills, a desire to succeed and
dedication to the cause were ultimately the most important factors.

“What we learned is that you don’t need to be a great cook to begin
with; you just need the will to learn,” she said. “You can make really
good food very simply.”

“Commitment was the No. 1 thing,” MacKinnon added.

“If a family was committed, even if they didn’t seem to be bringing
all kinds of local food-oriented skills to the table, they were gonna
be able to do it,” he said, noting that dedicated families who
initially ran into trouble eventually rose to the occasion.

Participants abound in different regions

Since
the publication of their book, the couple has heard from people living
in different regions across North America who have taken up the
local-eating challenge — “from Whitehorse to the desert southwest to
the Maritimes,” MacKinnon said.

“Some people are going to be ready to do it in the big, big way that
these families [in the documentary series] did. And other people might
just want to take it more slowly,” he said.

“But we do find that, universally, when people start to do it, they just want to keep doing it more and more.”

In the future, the couple said they would like to see even more
people adopt the diet, whether to reduce their ecological footprint,
for improved health or to develop more of an appreciation of farmland —
all benefits they have seen in their own lives.

“We would love to see other communities take on the challenge in
different landscapes at other times of the year,” MacKinnon said.

“There’s still [the] Whitehorse in the winter 100-mile challenge,” he quipped. “It would be perfect.”

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The original CBC News article can be found at:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/04/02/100-mile-challenge.html


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