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.
