The Fife Diet
This initiative asks people to sign-up for eating fresh food
from Fife, Scotland, for a year, monitor their progress and share
their experience. This is supposed to be a celebration of local
goodness not an exercise in self-denial. Fife has loads of fruit
and vegetables, fantastic farm-reared lamb, beef, poultry, and
amazing seafood.
The project was inspired by Vancouver's 100 Mile Diet and aims
to bring people together who are seriously into changing their
Carbon Footprint. You'll share ideas, inspiration and frustrations
on a group-blog and meet regularly to eat (!) drink and be merry.
It's no good just saying no. We can't just oppose Tescos, rage
against food-miles and rant against food packaging. In all aspects
of socio-ecology we need to build alternative platforms and
movements from within the shell of the old decaying society.
The Fife Diet
was inspired by people coming together at the
Big Tent Festival of Stewardship at Falkland June 16/17th
2007. The Fife Diet aims to:
- Bring people together who want to eat good local food
- Boost the local community of food producers
- Make fresh organic produce more widely available
- Help each other re-learn how to eat seasonally
- Celebrate the diversity of local food against the
ecological insanity of transporting food around the world
The 100 mile diet
When the average North American sits down to eat, each
ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles -call it
"the SUV diet."
On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa Smith and James
MacKinnon chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple
experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and
drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver,
British Columbia. Since then, James and Alisa have gotten
up-close-and-personal with issues ranging from the family-farm
crisis to the environmental value of organic pears shipped across
the globe. They've reconsidered vegetarianism and sunk their hands
into community gardening. They've eaten a lot of potatoes.
Their 100-Mile Diet struck a deeper chord than anyone could have
predicted. Within weeks, reprints of their blog at thetyee.ca had
appeared on sites across the internet. Then came the media, from
BBC Worldwide to Utne magazine. Dozens of individuals and
grassroots groups have since launched their own 100-Mile Diet
adventures.
See The 100 mile diet
or The Tyee
for more information
100 centimetre gardening
An article on growing food indoors (pdf)
others
Tray gardening - I sowed lambs lettuce, mustard and
assorted lettuce on Sunday morning in seed trays, and put them on a
sunny windowsill. By Thursday evening 2 lots of seeds were through!
I await results with interest: will it be great cheap fresh food or
knocked over by the cat... (by Trish from Herefoodshire)
Also see Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"
(published 2007) about their family's move to local eating in
Virginia.