Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

Still, Smith and MacKinnon, a 30-something couple from Vancouver, relate their year-long local eating adventure with such warmth and humor, it’s hard not to wholeheartedly root for their success as you read through the book. In alternating written-by-him/written-by-her chapters, the authors describe in near-confessional detail the highs, lows, little successes, huge aggravations, cravings and, yes, great satisfactions they discover in cobbling together a healthful, sustainable diet from sources no farther than a few hours’ drive away.

It all starts with lots and lots of potatoes.

Smith and MacKinnon make the unfortunate decision to start their experiment in a big city … in Canada … in March:

"(A)s one week turned into two and three on our 100-mile diet, I began to wonder how long I would have to go without tossed salad," Smith writes. "Where were the fresh green shoots? Our local farmers’ markets wouldn’t open until May. I looked despairingly at the rows of days left on the calendar. Even the local beets were gone from store shelves now. I wondered if we had done it single-handedly. Who else eats that much borscht?"

The ensuing months, though, bring a bounty of local foods found mostly beyond the grocery store: pickles and cheese curds from the farmers’ market, strawberries from a u-pick farm, pumpkin honey from an apiary, cod from a fish market, eggs from a free-range chicken farm, even — miraculously, after more than eight months without bread — flour from a rare wheat farmer on Vancouver Island.

Plenty is more than a "what-we-ate-for-breakfast-lunch-and-dinner" diary, though. Smith and MacKinnon also delve into the hows and whys of today’s "normal" food system: the decline of family farms, the ever-growing distance food travels from farm to plate, the apparent wealth of food proffered to us at a steep cost: our near-complete loss of connection with where real food comes from and how real food tastes.

"I had expected the 100-mile experiment to be a platform to think about many things, among them a long list of bummers from climate change to the failure of whole generations to learn how to recognize edible mushrooms," MacKinnon writes toward the end of the book. "What I could see around the table now was a less tangible consideration: a sense of adventure. We are at a point in world history where bad news about the state of the Earth is just as jaded and timeworn as the idea that there is nowhere left to go, nothing new to explore. Put those two statements side by side, however, and something hidden is revealed. Of course there are new things to do, and no shortage of them. We need to find new ways to live into the future. We can start anytime; we can live them here and now."

Throughout Plenty, Smith and MacKinnon tackle their subject with such refreshing affability, you find you don’t want to let them go at the end. Fortunately, readers who enjoy the book don’t have to: the couple continue to write about their local eating experiment at their website: "The 100-Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change."