Challenge yourself to eat local

Pull-up your socks Manitoban’s and challenge yourself for the month of November to eat within a 100-mile radius of your homes, or more specifically 160 kilometers. The 100-Mile Challenge encourages people to buy and eat local foods. It’s amazing how far the food in our grocery stores travel simply to end up on our plate, and while thinking about that think about the insane amount of energy that gets used to get our food from point A to point B. On average the ingredients on our plates have traveled at least 1500 kilometers.

Winter is coming meaning local food will be harder and harder to find; Peak of the Market is a good place to start, but try to do a little of your own research and find farmers close to you that can provide you with some of their foods and I’ll make it a bit easier for you just click here and go to farms and stores.

I found 11 reasons on Manitoba's 100-Mile Challenge website why you should challenge yourself with the diet.

1. Taste the difference. At a farmers’ market, most local produce has been picked inside of 24 hours. It comes to you ripe, fresh, and with its full flavor, unlike supermarket food that may have been picked weeks or months before. Close-to-home foods can also be bred for taste, rather than withstanding the abuse of shipping or industrial harvesting.

2. Know what you’re eating. Buying food today is complicated. What pesticides were used? Is that corn genetically modified? Was that chicken free range or did it grow in a box? People who eat locally find it easier to get answers. Many build relationships with farmers whom they trust. And when in doubt, they can drive out to the farms and see for themselves.

3. Meet your neighbours. Local eating is social. Studies show that people shopping at farmers’ market have ten times more conversations than their counterparts at the supermarket. Join a community garden and you’ll actually meet the people you pass on the street. Sign up with the 100-Mile Diet Society; we’ll be working to connect people in your area who care about the same things you do.

4. Get in touch with the season. When you eat locally, you eat what’s in season. You’ll remember that cherries are the taste of summer. Even in winter, comfort foods like squash soup and pancakes just make sense – a lot more sense than flavorless cherries from the other side of the world.

5. Discover new flavors. Ever tried sunchokes? How about purslane, quail eggs, yerba mora, or tayberries? These are just a few of the new (to us) flavors we sampled over a year of local eating. Our local spot prawns, we learned, are tastier than popular tiger prawns. Even familiar foods were more interesting. Count the types of pear on offer at your supermarket. Maybe three? Small farms are keeping alive nearly 300 other varieties – while more than 2,000 more have been lost in our rush to sameness.

6. Explore your home. Visiting local farms is a way to be a tourist on your own home turf, with plenty of stops for snacks.

7. Save the world. A study in Iowa found that a regional diet consumed 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet bases on food shipped across the country. The ingredients for a typical British meal, sourced locally, travelled 66 times fewer “food miles.” Or we can just kept burning those fossil fuels and learn to live with global climate change.

8. Support small farms. We discovered that many people from all walks of life dream of working the land – maybe you do too. In areas with strong local markets, the family farm is reviving. That’s the whole lot better than the jobs at Wal-Mart and fast-food outlets that the globalized economy offers in North American towns.

9. Give back to the local economy. A British study tracked how much of the money spent at a local food business stayed in the local economy, and how many times it was reinvested. The total value was almost twice the contribution of a dollar spent at a supermarket chain.

10. Be healthy. Everyone wants to know whether the 100-Mile Diet worked as a weight-loss program. Well, yes, we lost a few pound apiece. More importantly, though, we felt better than ever. We ate more vegetables and fewer processed products, sampled a wider variety of foods, and ate more fresh food at its nutritional peak. Eating from farmers’ markets and cooking from scratch, we never felt a need to count calories.

11. Have more fun while traveling. Once you’re addicted to local eating, you’ll want to explore it wherever you go by trying the local ingredients used by the people themselves.