The 160.934 kilometer diet?
As residents of Vancouver, B.C., maybe that's what James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith should have called their "100-mile diet." But who's complaining when their one-year experiment in eating only products grown or gathered close to home has helped spur a national phenomenon?
The couple's book, "Plenty," helped spark people in countless other communities to find their own eat-local paths. Entire neighborhoods and cities are taking on the quest after residents looked down at their plates and found, as MacKinnon did one day, that they had no connection to what they were eating and no idea where it was from. (Ballard is one of those neighborhoods; track its progress at goto.seattlepi.com/r1559.)
The Food Network is shooting a show on the diet in Mission, B.C., where Smith and MacKinnon have challenged 100 residents to try the diet for 100 days.
I caught up with the couple in Lake Forest Park, where "Plenty" is the choice of a citywide reading program. When they began the diet, "nine out of 10 aisles in the supermarket were invisible to us," MacKinnon said.
Long lists of items were crossed off their shopping lists, from packaged cereal to Tabasco sauce to chipotle peppers. But over the year, plenty of items were added in their place, such as spot prawns, Pacific sardines, miner's lettuce, sorrel, hedgehog mushrooms and wing beans.
Supermarkets are seen as places of maximum abundance, MacKinnon said, but they're actually an "enormous simplification of the food system," a place of limited choices. Smith, for instance, always thought she didn't like carrots. It turned out she just didn't like the kind of carrots the supermarkets carry.
They also found, to the surprise of some readers, that their diet didn't cause them to spend more money.
"We spent our money in different ways," MacKinnon said. Summer became more expensive, because when produce was at its peak, they bought large amounts for preserving. But they use fewer ingredients than they once did, they waste less, and they've found that they eat smaller portions.
Even after the challenge officially ended, the couple kept to a diet that was 85 percent to 90 percent locally produced. Eating locally is what tastes best to them, and it's become easier now that they know how to make it through the year.
They keep a small garden, mainly of items that are easy to grow but expensive to buy, such as fresh basil.
But they say if they could do the diet, on a practical level anyone can. They live on a tight budget, in a big city, in a small apartment.
"Anyone who owns a house has a kitchen four times bigger than we do," Smith said.
It's surprising, but exciting, to see so many people adopt their goals, the couple said. And the locavore landscape has vastly expanded since their experiment began.
One of the brightest developments for them was sourcing wheat -- the toughest task in their year of local eating. A farmer in British Columbia has planted a variety of wheat that grew widely in the region decades ago, but had vanished. He decided to plant it anew, Smith and MacKinnon discovered, after he read their book.
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