‘Plenty’ focuses on food finds

I heard about the 100 Mile Diet about a year before its creators wrote this book about it, when a friend who knows of my interest in local eating sent me a link to the Web site www.100milediet.org. For an entire year, starting on the first day of spring, James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, both freelance writers from Vancouver, B.C., were eating nothing but what they could obtain from within a 100-mile radius of their apartment.

I was immediately intrigued by their experiment and halfheartedly thought I might try something like that myself. Then I realized that even doubling the radius to 200 miles from my home on the Palouse – while it would get me a lot of good Washington wines – would still require our family to give up salmon, halibut, olive oil, rice, peanut butter, chocolate, bananas, tea and, I think, sugar. And lots of other things. I’d found sources of local meat and vegetables and fruit, but hadn’t yet been able to find someone who could or would sell us local milk, so we’d be dairyless, which was out of the question.

I thought these Canadians were getting off easy. After all, they would have all the salmon they wanted, at least, and surely the city has a thriving farmers’ market. I’ve seen how people eat in Seattle and the San Juans, all those artisan cheeses, blackberry desserts and seafood stews. What could Vancouver residents be deprived of in such a lush environment?

Well, wheat, as it turns out, something we take for granted on the Palouse. For seven months, until they located a rogue wheat farmer on Vancouver Island, MacKinnon and Smith didn’t have bread, pancakes or pasta. No sandwiches, no cake, no cookies. They also couldn’t find a local source for their beloved lentils and chickpeas – yet another foodstuff we take for granted here. It became a diet in more ways than one, despite MacKinnon’s talent for creative cooking, and the quantities of eggs and butter available to them.

“I think your ass fell off,” MacKinnon tells Smith at one point early in their experiment, as her jeans hang on her hips. Most of MacKinnon’s prose, by the way, is much more poetic than that statement would indicate.

Great life challenges offer the opportunity to take the measure of one’s self, and each of the authors do so compellingly as they take turns writing chapters. Each crafts a balanced blend of information and incisive commentary about the sorry state of our centralized food system, while letting us peek into their lives, month by month. Their search for food takes up much of their time; they prowl the supermarket aisles without much success and eventually discover nearby suburban and urban farms, and familiarize themselves with their bioregion’s climates and microclimates.

Still, life marches on. Along with her usual freelance work, Smith has to deal with the death of her beloved grandmother and face her own ambivalence about the kitchen, her home, and MacKinnon; MacKinnon comes to the aid of his struggling brother, cooks his first meat in 18 months, and wonders what’s up with Smith. Sometimes, the personal meets the big picture in a particularly striking way, as when a chemical spill in a nearby river wipes out the fish that our two heroes were looking forward to eating. Even better is when Smith manages to make a pie using her grandmother’s copy of Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

Meanwhile, their apartment becomes one big pantry, with potatoes in the closet, squash on the shelves, home-canned produce spilling out of the cupboards. Those of us accustomed to having a pantry, a basement and a full-sized freezer to store our food can only shake our heads at the challenges of pulling this experiment off in a one-bedroom apartment in the city.

Accustomed as we are to having whatever we want to eat whenever we want, it is too easy to get caught up in the sheer challenges of the 100-mile experiment. The list of foods unavailable to people who choose to eat only local foods could go on and on. The authors do lay it out early in the book: no beer, no citrus, no Oreos, ad nauseum. The first morning of their rather cold-turkey experiment, having decided they can consume unqualified food that is already on the premises, they quarrel briefly about Smith’s decision to have hot chocolate while MacKinnon abstains.

“You’re depriving me of future hot chocolate!” MacKinnon complains.

Their quest for wheat and flour, on the other hand, becomes an entire subplot. It is a far more gripping subplot in my opinion than the one in which the authors’ personal relationship is on the rocks. The day they actually acquire flour takes on “Mission Impossible” proportions. But “Plenty,” as the title implies, is about abundance rather than deprivation. Petty fights about hot chocolate are funny in hindsight, their edge always giving way to moments of mutual glee, usually centered on a serendipitous find: organic blueberries, heirloom tomatoes, wheels of farm cheese, honey. Their taste buds, and their world, open up a little more with each new discovery.