Eating only what grows around you

Allison Linn Senior writer • Profile • E-mail

When Katherine Gray takes her kids to the grocery store, they can pick out as many apples and pears as their hearts desire. But bananas? Pineapples? Mangoes? Sorry kids, if they weren’t grown within 100 miles of Gray’s house in Portland, Ore., chances are they won’t make it into the grocery cart.

For years, the idea of eating only food grown locally and in season was reserved for upscale chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., or serious hippies living off the grid, while the rest of us didn’t think twice about gulping down blueberries from Chile or avocadoes from Mexico.

Recently, however, a small but devoted number of Americans have started to think a lot more about the origin of the food going into their grocery cart. Worried about the environmental impact of shipping food hundreds of miles, plus the dwindling fate of local farmers – and obsessed with the idea of eating really good food – these extreme eaters try to only buy food that is grown within a 100-mile radius of their own home.

“When we first started talking about it, at the beginning, people thought we were a little bit off our rockers, and now it’s become part of this mainstream discussion,” says Jennifer Maiser, one of a group of San Francisco “locavores” who pioneered an effort to eat locally a few years ago.

Around the same time, a couple in Vancouver, British Columbia, became alarmed after hearing about a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which showed that the average distance a piece of produce travels from U.S. farms to households in the upper Midwest is 1,500 miles.

They made the decision to spend a year trying to live only on food grown within 100 miles of their Canada home.

An engaging book about their effort, “Plenty,” spawned a devoted international following, and now co-author Alisa Smith says activities related to eating locally, such as speaking engagements, are pretty much a full-time job. The fact that eating locally has touched such a nerve still surprises her.

“When we first started writing it, it was a personal experiment for us,” she says. “But we started to hear from people in England, France, Australia, and it just took off from there.”

The movement has grown popular enough to spawn serious research into how much eating locally could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with at least one researcher arguing that, other benefits aside, it may not be the environmental savior some are hoping for.

Gray, who is 34 and runs her own business in addition to raising two small children, doesn’t consider herself a gourmet chef, but she does like to eat healthy. About two years ago, she started reading more about industrialized food production, and it got her thinking about what her family could do to make a difference. Then she came across the book “Plenty” and found her solution.

“I like a plan,” she says.

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Soon, the family was eating a lot more eggs and potatoes and trying vegetables they had never heard of, including one that looked like a white carrot and tasted, inexplicably, like an oyster. They became regulars at the farmers market and the natural food store, and Gray purchased some new cookbooks. Now she says about 80 percent of the fresh food they eat is grown locally.

“I didn’t feel like we’d be able to do it, and then I realized how, when you start looking, there are a lot of resources out there,” she says.

Nevertheless, she says she remains an anomaly even in liberal-minded Portland: “I still am the freaky one here.”

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