(100) miles away from a perfect diet

For environmentally conscious eaters, finding locally grown good eats 365 days a year is a challenge not manywill relish

Toronto’s 100-mile sandwich starts off okay but soon gets, well, odd. You have your choice of sliced beef, chicken, pork or a fried egg — or all four — and lettuce and tomatoes in season. Maybe sprouts or carrots can be used the rest of the year. There’s a dab of butter, but likely no condiments. As for bread, try two honey- dipped doughnuts.

Hey, it’s better than a turnip sandwich.

That’s what a British Columbia couple had to resort to last summer when they took on the challenge of only eating food originating within 100 miles, or 160 kilometres, of their Vancouver home. Because wheat is not grown in southwestern B.C., bread was off the menu. Roasted turnips served as a substitute.

“ We kind of felt for awhile like we are on an involuntary Atkins Diet,” Alisa Smith, who is on the diet with her husband James McKinnon, jokes in a telephone interview. The couple has also had to cut out sugar, since sugar cane grows only in tropical climates, and coffee. “ Luckily for me, I don’t drink coffee,” Smith says, adding that giving up spices has been a bigger adjustment for her as she has moved to seasoning more often with herbs, garlic and onions. She hopes her new diet will get people thinking about where their food comes from — and how much imported food they eat when so much is available locally. Canada imported more than $20 billion worth of food last year, including $ 5.8 billion worth of fruits and vegetables and $748 million in coffee. Wayne Roberts, policy coordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council, which operates as a subcommittee of the city’s board of health, says all that imported food is brought to us by fossil- fuel burning trucks, trains, planes and boats.

“ There is a real connection between food and global warming,” he says.

Chris Winter, executive director of the Conservation Council of Ontario, says there is a “ fledgling” local food movement that needs encouragement from business and government to prosper. “ We need to make the link between what we grow in the greenbelt and what we eat.” These issues will be discussed this morning at a breakfast forum sponsored by the Canadian Urban Institute at Metro Hall, looking into the ongoing debate of urban sprawl versus food production in the Greater Toronto Area. The discussion, starting at 7: 45 a. m., will look at the B. C. couple’s efforts, although they won’t be present.

It’s worth looking at what Torontonians could eat if they were to take on the 100- mile challenge. Surrounded as the city is by the country’s richest farmland, it should be easy to eat only local food. Even delightful. Though far from a definitive or scientific survey, there are fruits, vegetables, meats and cheeses produced close at hand. There’s even some very good beer and wine to wash it all down, and a decadent cornucopia of cookies, ice cream and doughnuts. Think again. Better yet, take a closer look the next time you go shopping. Just because nearly all of the food a person needs is produced nearby doesn’t mean all of it is available at your local grocer, or that it’s possible to tell where your food is coming from.

All of which means a 100- mile diet could prove difficult. Take our sandwich. Toronto has lots of flour mills and big bakeries making bread. But there’s a hitch. Most of the wheat — 85 per cent — used to make bread flour is grown in Western Canada. It’s called hard wheat and is higher in protein than the soft wheat that dominates the Ontario crop. Higher protein helps bind baked goods together, so soft wheat is better suited to cookies, pastries and doughnuts, says Larry Shapton, general manager of the Ontario Wheat Board. Hence the doughnuts- forbread substitution. The meat should be no problem, given all of the slaughterhouses close to Toronto. The same goes for vegetables,

with the Holland

Marsh just

north of

the

city. Egg are packed in Mississauga.

“ It’s really very complicated” to buy local food all of the time, says Zahra Parvinian of Toronto’s FoodShare program. She should know. Parvinian buys the food that fills 4,000 Good Food Boxes distributed throughout the city every month by her non- profit agency. For $ 17, the basic box contains about a week’s worth of fruits and vegetables for a family of four. There are organic, seniors’ and other boxes, as well. Her weekly struggle to fill the boxes with local produce provides a glimpse of what anyone on a 100- mile diet might face.

“ Two weeks ago, everything in the box was local,” she says. But the box being delivered today contains just six local products and seven imported, as Ontario’s fall harvest fades into memory and Parvinian must rely on imports.

If Parvinian’s struggles illustrate difficulties faced by ordinary shoppers, her solutions are instructive. Despite winter, there are local goods she can

buy all year round, she says.

It just takes some effort and

compromise.

“ For the whole year, all

the apples and pears in the

box are local,” she says,

adding that both store well.

In season, Parvinian also

puts in strawberries and

peaches, but doing so

through the winter

means buying imported produce, she says,

echoing the experience of many a grocery

shopper. Vegetables

present similar seasonal

challenges, with some

storing better through

winter than others.

“ All of the rooted vegetables from carrots to parsnips to potatoes and onions

can be stored,” Parvinian says. But that means no leafy veggies — such as lettuce — out of season without buying imports. At home, Parvinian buys up fruits and vegetables in season and freezes what she can’t eat for use through the winter. Such added effort and restricted diets hardly seem necessary, given the bounty found in grocery stores thanks to imported foods. “ You can go into any grocery store anywhere 365 days of the year and get fruits and vegetables from around the world,” says the wheat board’s Shapton.

Roberts of the food council says Jacques Cartier found natives growing corn — a Mexican grain — on the island of Montreal when he sailed the St. Lawrence 470 years ago, evidence that trade has long been a part of Canadian food consumption. And because it would take incredible devotion to resist the temptations of a world’s worth of fresh produce and stick to a diet of stored root vegetables and apples, he suggests a compromise solution of eating food that comes from an average of 160 kilometres away.

“ We don’t want to become captive to the gimmick,” says Roberts, who grows sprouts in his kitchen so he can have greens on his sandwiches through the winter. Canada imported more that $274 million worth of lettuce from the U. S. southwest alone last year. Under Roberts’ solution, growing some of your own food in backyard gardens or elsewhere — tomatoes, carrots, onions, potatoes and lettuce are easy — would allow going a few hundred kilometres further afield to get foods that aren’t available locally.

Roberts says the great shame of today’s food system is that while a wide variety of food can and is grown locally, it is not geared to serving the needs of the local community, outside the narrow harvest season. He would like to see some of the millions of dollars spent every year on food research redirected to finding ways for local farmers to get a bigger share of their local grocery markets.

“ We don’t have the infrastructure for 100- mile food,” he says. “ That needs to change.”